must stay, and work, small spirits that dance and sing. The Christians knew that my Lord was but a young man, and so they brought these things, and my Lord gave them of his riches, and conversed with them familiarly as though they had been of the House of a Grand Shareef. But in the far east of the Maghreb the French closed the oases of Tuat and Tidikelt without rebuke, and burnt the villages and destroyed the true believers with guns containing green devils and said, 'We do all this that we may venture safely abroad without fear of robbers.'

Then my

Lord sent the War Minister, the Kaid M'heddi el Menebhi, to London and he saw your Sultan face to face. And your Sultan's Viziers said to him: "Tell the Sultan of Morocco to rule as we rule, to gather his taxes peaceably and without force, to open his ports, to feed his prisoners, to follow the wisdom of the West. If he will do this, assuredly his kingdom shall never be moved.' Thereafter they took the Kaid and showed him their palaces, their pleasures, and the power of their devil-ships that move without sails over the face of the waters, and their unveiled women who pass without shame before the eyes of men. Now though the Kaid said nothing he remembered all these things, and when he returned and, by the aid of your own Bashador in Tanjah, prevailed over the enemies who had set snares in his path while he fared abroad, he stood before the face of my Lord and told him all he had seen, Thereupon my Lord Abd-el-Aziz sought to change that which had gone before, to make a new land as quickly as the stork makes a new nest, or the boar of the Atlas, whom the hunter has disturbed, makes a new lair. And the land grew confused; it was no more the Maghreb, but it assuredly was not as the land of the West.

8 The Rogui, known throughout Morocco as Bu Hamara (Father of the She Ass), is the

"In the beginning of the season of change the French were angry. 'All men shall pay an equal tax throughout my land,' said the King of the Age, and the Bashador of the French said, 'Our protected subjects shall not yield even a handful of green corn to the gatherer.' And when the people saw that the tax-gatherers did not travel as they were wont to travel, armed and ready to kill, they hardened their hearts and said, 'We will pay no taxes at all, for these men cannot overcome us.' Then the French Bashador said to the Sultan: "Thou seest that these people will not pay, but we will give all the money that is needed. Only sign these writings that set forth our claim to the money that is brought by Nazarenes to the sea-ports, and everything will be well.'

"So the Sultan set his seal upon all that was brought before him, and the French gold came to his treasury and more French traders came to his Court, so that my Lord gave them the money that had come to him from their country for more of the foolish and wicked things they brought. And then he left Marrakesh and went to Fez, and the Roguis rose up and waged war against him."

The Hadj sighed deeply and paused while fresh tea was brought by a coal-black slave, whose color was accentuated by the scarlet kerchief upon her head and the broad silver anklets about her feet. When she had retired and we were left alone once more, my host continued.

"You know what happened after. My Lord Abd-el-Aziz made no headway against the Rogui, who is surely assisted by devils or by the devils of France. North and south, east and west, the Moors flocked to him, for they said, "The Sultan has become a Christian.' And to-day my Lord has no more Pretender who has been lately making war against the Sultan.

money, and no strength to fight the Infidel, and the French come forward, and the land is troubled everywhere. But this is clearly the decree of Allah, the All Wise, the All Pitying, the One, and if it is written that the days of the Filali Shareefs are numbered, even my Lord will not avoid his fate."

I said nothing, for I had seen the latter part of Morocco's history working itself out, and I knew that the improved relations between Great Britain and France had their foundations in the change of front that kept our Foreign Office from doing for Morocco what it has done for other States divided against themselves, and what it has promised Morocco, without words, very clearly. Then again it was obvious to me, though I could not hope to explain it to my host, that the Moor, having served his time, had to go under before the wave of Western civilization. Morocco has held out longer than any other kingdom of Africa, not by reason of its own strength, but because the rulers of Europe could not afford to see the Mediterranean balance of power seriously disturbed. Just as Mulai Ismail praised Allah publicly two centuries ago for giving him strength to drive out the Infidel, when the British voluntarily relinquished their hold upon Tangier, so successive Moorish Sultans have thought that they have held Morocco for the Moors by their own power. And yet, in very

sober truth Morocco has been no more than one of the pawns in the diplomatic game these many years past.

We who know and like the country, finding in its patriarchal simplicity so much that contrasts favorably with the hopeless vulgarity of our own civilization, must recognize the great gulf lying between a country's aspect in the eyes of the traveller and in the mind of the politician.

Before we parted the Hadj, prefacing his remark with renewed assur

ance of his personal esteem, told me that the country's error had been its admission of strangers. Poor man, his large simple mind could not realize that no power his master held could have kept them out. He told me on another occasion that the great Viziers who had opposed the Sultan's reforms were largely influenced by fear lest Western ideas should alter the status of their womenkind. They had heard from all their envoys to Europe how great a measure of liberty is accorded to women, and were prepared to rebel against any reform that might lead to compulsory alteration of the system under which women live, too often as mere slaves and playthings, in Morocco. Fears about the question of women were at the bottom of most of the opposition to reforms that came from the wealthy Moors. We parted with many expressions of goodwill and he remains for me the best informed and most reasonable Moor I have met. His summary of his country's recent history was by no means complete, but it had to suffer translation and, if he could revise it here, would doubtless have far more interest. But it seemed advisable to get the Moorish point of view and, having secured the curious elusive thing, to record it as nearly as might be.

Sidi Boubikir (my landlord in Marrakesh, a man of high standing, for many years British Political Agent in the Southern capital) seldom discussed politics. "I am in the south and the trouble is in the north," said he. "The Praise to Allah, but I am all for my Lord Abd-el-Aziz. In the reign of his grandfather I made money, when my Lord his father ruled (upon him the Peace!) I made money, and now to-day I make money. Shall I listen then to Pretenders and other evil men? The Sultan may have half my fortune."

I did not suggest what I knew to be true, that the Sultan would have been

more than delighted to take him at his word. A very considerable knowledge of Moghrebbin Arabic, in combination with hypnotic skill, would have been required to draw from Boubikir his real opinions of the political outlook. Not for nothing has he held a responsible office in South Morocco. The Sphinx is not more inscrutable.

One night his son came to the Dar al Kasdir and brought me an invitation from Sidi Boubikir to dine with him on the following afternoon. Arrived before the gate of his palace at the time appointed, two o'clock, we found the old diplomatist waiting to welcome me. He wore a fine linen gown of dazzling whiteness and carried a scarlet geranium in his hand. "You are welcome," he said gravely, and walked before us through a long corridor crying aloud as he went, "Make way, make way," for we were entering the house itself, and it is not seemly that a Moorish woman, whether she be wife or concubine, should look upon a stranger's face. Yet some few lights of the hareem were not disposed to be extinguished altogether by considerations of etiquette, and passed hurriedly along, as though bent upon avoiding us and uncertain of our exact direction, while the female servants satisfied their curiosity openly until my host suddenly commented upon the questionable moral status of their mothers, and then they made haste to disappear,-only to return a moment later and peep round corners and doorways and giggle and scream, for all the world as if they had been Europeans of the same class.

Sidi Boubikir passed from room to room of his great establishment and showed some of its treasures. There were great piles of carpets, and vast quantities of furniture that must have looked out at one time in their history upon the crowds that throng the Tottenham Court Road. I saw chairs, sofas, bedsteads, clocks and sideboards.

All must have been brought on camels through Dukala and Rahamna to Marrakesh, and were left to fill up the countless rooms without care or arrangement though their owner's house must hold more than fifty women without counting servants. Probably when they are not quarrelling, or dyeing their finger-nails, or painting their faces after a fashion that is far from pleasing to European eyes, the ladies of the hareem passed their days lying on cushions, playing the lute, or eating sweetmeats.

With

In one room on the ground-floor there was a great collection of mechanical toys. Sidi Boubikir explained that the French Commercial Attaché had brought a large number to the Sultan's Palace and that my Lord Abd-el-Aziz had rejected the ones before us. the curious childish simplicity that is found so often among the Moors in high places, Boubikir insisted upon winding up the clockwork apparatus of nearly all the toys. Then one doll danced, another played a drum, and a third went through gymnastic exercises; the toy orchestra played the Marseillaise, while from every nook and corner veiled figures stole out cautiously, for all the world as though this room in a Moorish house were a stage and they were the chorus entering mysteriously from unexpected places. The old man's merriment was very real and hearty, so genuine, in fact, that he did not notice how his womenfolk were intruding until the last note sounded. Then he turned round and the swathed figures disappeared suddenly as ghosts at cockcrow.

Though it was clear that Sidi Boubikir seldom saw half the rooms through which he hurried me, the passion for building that seizes all rich Moors held him fast. He was adding wing after wing to his vast premises, and would doubtless order more furniture from London to fill the new rooms. Νο

Moor knows when it is time to call a halt and deem his house complete, and so the country is full of palaces begun by men who fell from power or died leaving the work unfinished. The late

Grand Vizier Abu Ahmad left a palace nearly as big as the Dar Maghzen itself, and since he died the storks that built upon the flat roofs have been its only occupants. So it is with the gardens whose many beauties he hoped to enjoy. I rode past them one morning and saw all manner of fruit-trees blossoming, heard birds singing in their branches, and saw young storks fishing in the little pools that the winter's rains had left. But there was not a single gardener there to tend the ground once so highly cultivated, and I was assured that the terror of the Vizier's name kept even the hungry beggars from the fruit in harvest-time.

ner.

The home and its appointments duly exhibited, Sidi Boubikir led the way to a divan in a well-cushioned room that opened on to the garden. He clapped his hands and a small regiment of female servants, black and for the most part uncomely, arrived to prepare dinOne brought a ewer, another a basin, a third a towel, and water was poured out over our hands. Then a large porcelain bowl, encased in strong basket-work was brought by a fourth servant, and a tray of flat loaves of fine wheat by a fifth, and we broke bread and said the Bismillah which stands for grace. The bowl was uncovered and revealed a savory stew of chicken with sweet lemon and olives, a very pleasing sight to all who appreciate Eastern cooking. The use of knives being a crime against the Faith and the use of forks and spoons unknown, we plunged the fingers of the right hand into the bowl and sought what pleased us best, using the bread to deal with the sauce of the stew. It was really a delicious dish, and when later in the afternoon I asked my host

for the recipe he said he would give it to me if I would fill the bowl with Bank of England notes. I had to explain that in my ignorance of the full resources of Moorish cookery I had not come out with sufficient money.

So soon as the charm of the first bowl palled, it was taken away and others followed in quick succession, various meats and eggs being served with olives and spices and the delicate vegetables that come to Southern Morocco in early spring. It was a relief to come to the end of our duties, and, our hands washed once more, to digest the meal with the aid of green tea served with mint. Strong drink being forbidden to the true believer, water only was served with the dinner, and as it was brought direct from the Tensift river and was of a muddy, red color, there was no temptation to touch it. Sidi Boubikir was in excellent spirits and told many stories of his earlier days, of his dealings with Bashadors, his quarrel with the great Kaid Ben Daoud, the siege of the city by Illegitimate Men, of his journey to Gibraltar, and of how he met one of the Rothschilds there and tried to do business with him. He spoke of his investments in Consols and the poor return they brought him, and of many other matters of equal moment.

It was not easy to realize that the man who spoke so brightly and lightly about trivial affairs had one of the keenest intellects in the country, that he had the secret history of its political intrigues at his fingers' ends, that he was the trusted agent of the British Government, and lived and thrived surrounded by enemies. So far as was consistent with courtesy I tried to direct his reminiscences towards politics, but he kept to purely personal matters and included in them a story of his attempt to bribe a British Minister, to whom he went upon the occasion of the British Mission in

Marrakesh, leading two mules laden with silver dollars.

"And when I came to him," said the old man, "I said, 'By Allah's Grace I am a rich man, so I have brought you some share of my wealth.' But he would not even count the bags. He I called with a loud voice for his wife, and cried to her: 'See now what this son of a camel-driver would do to me. He would give me his miserable money.' And then in very great anger he drove me from his presence and bade Macmillan's Magazine.

me never come near him again bearing a gift. What shall be said of a man like that, to whom Allah had given the wisdom to become a Bashador and the foolishness to reject a present? Two mules, remember, and each one with as many bags of Spanish dollars as it could carry. Truly the ways of your Bashadors are past belief."

I agreed heartily with Sidi Boubikir; a day's discourse would not have made clear any other aspect of the case. S. L. Bensusan.

An artist passed away in Munich on the 6th of May, of whom an eminent Art historian wrote as follows on the morrow of his death:

A life has come to an end, rich and beautiful as that of no second Artist of our time. Lenbach towered above our bourgeois age, like some scion of those distant days when Artists mixed on an equality with Kings, when the Emperor Charles the Fifth did not disdain to pick up the brush which had fallen from the hand of a Titian, and Rubens rode through the city of Antwerp decked in a chain of gold.'

The Art world in Germany forgot for the moment its petty envies and jealousies, and joined in with the spirit of Shakespeare's noble words whichas if coined anew for the occasionburst forth simultaneously from the whole German Press: "Take him for all in all he was a Man, we shall not look upon his like again."

According to that acute observer of national life, Gustave le Bon, the true artist,

1 Richard Muther, on Franz von Lenbach"Frankfurter Zeitung," May 8th, 1904.

whether Poet, architect, or painterpossesses the magic faculty of expressing in his syntheses the soul of an epoch and of a race. Very impressionable, very unconscious, thinking more especially in images and reasoning but little, Artists are at certain epochs the faithful mirrors of the society in which they live; their works are the most exact documents to which recourse can be had with a view to evoking a vanished civilization. They are too unconscious not to be sincere, and too much impressed by their surroundings not to give faithful expression to the ideas, sentiments, needs and tendencies of their environment.

Many are of opinion that in Franz von Lenbach Germany possessed one of those rare artists who reflect the soul of an epoch, for his work will hand down to coming generations the dominant personalities of a glorious period in German history. Prince Bismarck went out of his way to declare that it pleased him to feel that he would be known hereafter by means of Lenbach's portraits.

The story of Lenbach's humble par

2 "The Psychology of Peoples." By Gustave le Bon. Fisher Unwin, 1899.