very long bow indeed; as when the monks of Dijon, uncertain as to whether they should side with Chraumes, who had revolted against his brother Clotaire, turned up a chapter in Isaiah, and lighting on the text, 'I will pluck up the fence of my vineyard, and it shall be destroyed,' at once concluded to make cause in favour of Clotaire. Now, Chraumes was not a vineyard; but the implication was held to be close enough to jump with the monkish humour.

Vates was near' or close enough, then, in his prophecy; and for many days I had quite made up my mind that my Damascus was to be here, and that I should make an end of it at Blidah. You fancy all kinds of things when you have got rheumatic gout; and the more helpless is your miserable body, the more nervously active does your mind become. In fact, one of the best definitions I can fix upon for temporary delirium is that your intellect, meanly taking advantage of your physical prostration, goes out for a walk. That is called wandering; and, to a modified extent, such capricious promenades are made by the mind in dreams.

I suppose my rheumatic gout, or fever, or whatever it was that made me a helpless cripple, fit only to lie in bed, and groan, and with difficulty help myself to cup after cup of iced lemonade from an enormous bowl of that refreshing beverage which was placed beside my couch-I suppose this most irritating of ailments kept me on my back for about ten days. Of course I was in hourly expectation of pericarditis, dropsy, and the accomplishment of Vates' prophecy; but it didn't come to that. I had a French doctor, who was a very good fellow. From his first prescription of la diète absolue-which meant that I was to have nothing to eat (and I am sure I didn't want anything)—and from his insistence that I should swallow large quantities of tisanes-mint tea, sassafras tea, mandrake tea, sarsaparilla tea, hellebore tea, and the like (a French doctor will prescribe a tisane for a broken leg)-I suspected my medico to be of the great Sangrado family, and opined that his next step would be (in the interest of Bob Vates) to bleed me. But he forbore phlebotomy, and turned out, as I have said, to be a very tive of true love, the course of which did not run smooth. St. Consortia, in her youth, was passionately courted by a young man of very powerful family. She reciprocated his love; but she had given some kind of pledge to her family that she would take the veil. She asked her lover for a week's delay to determine her choice. At the expiration of this time, which she employed in devout exercises, the young man, accompanied by one of the most distinguished matrons of the city, came to know her decision. I can neither accept you nor refuse you,' replied the maiden; 'everything is in the hands of heaven; but if you agree to it, let us go to the church, and have a mass said; afterwards we will lay the gospel on the altar, and say a joint prayer, and open the book to be certainly informed of the will of providence in this affair. The proposal was accepted; the sortes sanctorum were said; but the first verse which met the eyes of the unlucky pair was the sublime one beginning, 'Whoso loveth father or mother more,' &c. You see,' cried St. Consortia, 'heaven claims me as its own.' And she took the veil. I hope I shall not be thought irreverent in quoting a story which was first told by a saint.

good fellow; and when I got better, would sit for hours at my bedside, narrating strange stories of the Bedouin douars and the bureaux Arabes-of the taking of smalat, the hunting of lions, and the coursing-matches of the Bedouin chiefs, whose greyhounds would, I fancy, rather astonish the noble proprietor of Master M'Grath and other competitors for the Waterloo cup. He had known Algeria in the old days of the Regency, and when it was indeed Barbary ;' and when, under the beneficent sway of the Turkish Deys, it was by no means a matter of mathematical certainty if a man went to bed with his head on, that he should find it still on his shoulders when he woke the next morning.

He had been into harems, had this experienced physician, and his coat had been more than once half torn off his back by infuriated houris because he had been unable to cure a chief Odalisque's raging tooth. I grew at last to love this doctor, and was specially grateful to him for allowing me to smoke in an early stage of convalescence. How we hate the doctor who puts the tobacco-pouch under taboo! I tendered him a napoleon as his first fee, but told him I was poor, and could not afford a similar honorarium every time; but he said, 'Bêtise!' and pushing back the piece of gold, told me that he would send me my bill when I got well. I am sure I must have seen him thirty times; and when at last I went away to Oran, he told me that would I give him a hundred francs, he would be amply paid, medicine and all. Car, voyez-vous,' he remarked, in a singular spirit of philosophic contentment, cent franes c'est un pécule; c'est une somme.' 'Twas but four pounds any way; and I cannot say that I have ever found much spending in eighty shillings. Good old Doctor Rasticolis, I wonder where you are now! He knew a little-a very little-English, and had often promised himself, he said, to become a subscriber to the Lancet. Sidnam-great man; Sheselden-ver great man; Jon Onterre-moch great man,' he would exclaim. I imagine he thought those illustrious practitioners were still alive. By the way, he had been in early life an assistant-surgeon in the navy; and have you not found that the vast majority of those who have had anything to do with the sea have a habit of being very good fellows, and careless in moneymatters? He had the Cross of the Legion of Honour for services rendered to the Arabs during a time of cholera and famine; he had eight children (a brown little Provençale woman was his wife; and she gave me some Nougat de Montélimar, the most delicious of all lollipops, when I went away), and he was as poor as Job. I am inclined to think there are a good many Doctors Rasticolis in this world-virtuous, contented, cheerful, just, and quite obscure and neglected.

My room was on the first-floor back of an hotel-the hotel, in fact, of Blidah, which is in the centre of a wealthy agricultural dis

trict, and is garrisoned, besides, by a regiment of infantry; for in this country Peace has always to be drawn armed, and ploughing is scarcely practicable without the aid of muskets and fixed bayonets. The hotel was, de fond en comble, a French one. The landlady was a Marseillaise― voluble, passionate, kind-hearted, and a prodigious liar. Her temper was amusingly violent. She was always showing-up somebody: now Celestine the maid, who was a pure Parisian ex-grisette, with an inextinguishable passion for fromage de Brie, and eggs boiled in cochineal to make their shells crimson-I am sure she imagined that to be their natural hue; now Jean the waiter, formerly a drummer in the twenty-third regiment of the line, and who claimed (he was a liar too; and we are all liars) to have once worsted the Emir Abdel-Kader in single combat by caving-in' the parchment of his drum on that Paladin's head-'Je lui enfonce la caisse sur sa boule comme ça-crac!' would this Munchausenesque waiter repeat, striking one palm against the other; now Zepherini her niece, whose ears she would box until she howled, and had to be pacified with gingerbread.; and now her husband, a meek little man hailing from Lyons, whe also officiated as cook in the establishment, and who, when I was restored to health, frequently vanquished me at dominoes. The officers of the regiment in garrison held their table-d'hôtes at the hotel; the subalterns in the public salle-à-manger; the captains and field-officers in another apartment; while the colonel in solitary grandeur-in the first-floor front indeed, the room next to mine. A common mess for all grades of officers has not yet been established in the French army, although Napoleon III. has done his best to establish the system in the garrison of Paris. I don't think the colonel enjoyed his isolated dignity much; for I frequently heard him swearing terribly at Jean the waiter; and once I was sensible of sounds remotely resembling a kick. Perhaps the imaginative ex-drummer had been rash enough to tell his story of Abd-el-Kader and the drum, and the colonel had with his boot avenged the cause of outraged truth. On the day prior to my departure this awful officer asked me to dinner. He had served in the Crimea, and was good enough to inform me that the English guards were 'prodigies of solidity;' but his most enthusiastic admiration was reserved for the Highland regiments, whose valour and whose costume seemed equally to have astonished him. Et les femmes écossaises, portent-elles aussi le kilt?' he asked, his little black eyes twinkling merrily. I was so far from home-a beau mentir qui vient de loin-and he had been so hospitable, that I thought there was no harm in telling him a trifling Munchausenism to please him; so I replied that the Highland ladies did wear the garb of old Gael on solemn occasions. After all, the fib was not 'such a very outrageous one; for is not the kilt a petticoat? And a petticoat, I take it, may be either long or short, as the wearer pleases. I have seen it worn very short indeed at the Impropriety theatre.

Everything was French about me-everything save the cigars, which were of Algerian make, and more abominable in flavour than even the French petits Bordeaux. To be sure, the Algerines cost only a farthing apiece. But the leaden match-boxes were French, the wine was French, the eau-de-Selz was French, and the bill of fare was in accordance with the Medean and Persian law of secondrate French cookery-pot-au-feu bouilli, vegetables, skinny fowl or tough bit of mutton, preserved pears, haricot beans, exiguous dessert; Roquefort, Gruyère, and Brie cheese; black coffee, and bad cognac, day after day. I went to bed in a French alcove, and on the wall over against me hung French lithographs-the Chien du Régiment,' after Horace Vernet; Un Anglais à Mabille,' after Gustave Doré; 'Souvenirs du Mardi gras,' after some artist in Legs, unknown. A French ormolu clock ticked on the mantelpiece, a French almanac hung on the wall. Surely,' I used to cry out, I must be in Paris. This is not Blidah, but the Boulevard Montmartre, and at my old quarters at the Hôtel Beauséjour, au quatrième. Well-remembered hostel! Do you mind it, R. G. G.? There were four corn-cutters in the Beauséjour-'Quatres pédicures dans la maison opérant à toutes heures.' What a temptation! Eisenburg and Rendall multiplied by two ready to cut your corns at all hours of the day and night!

6

But I had only to approach my back window for France and Paris to fade away into nothingness, and for me to find myself once more in Africa. The tall minarets of the chief mosque of Blidah were right over against me, and, at stated periods, the shrill voice of the muezzin ostensibly called the faithful to prayers, though the more immediate effect of his summons seemed to be to scatter the pigeons which roosted on the roof of the edifice. These were comparatively tame pigeons; but almost every evening, just before sunset, my window would be nearly darkened by the flight of innumerable flocks of wild pigeons, so serried in their ranks that they looked like black clouds sweeping across the azure sky in a sudden stormgust. Between the mosque and the narrow street into which my back window looked, there was a forest of roofs, some tiled, the greater part flat, like the azoteas of Mexico; and to these roofs at sunset, the Moors would come up to smoke their chibouks, sip their coffee, and enjoy the evening breeze. Their black servants-slavery of course no longer exists in Algeria, but a very kindly system of domestic servitude leads to negroes, male and female, passing their whole lives in the same native household-would bring up cushions for their masters to loll upon, and then they would rig-up sheets on poles to protect them from the last of Sol's rays; and at once you were reminded of the old, old stories of those who went up to the housetops.' This was not only Africa, but the unchangeable East.

THE ROMAN GIRL OF THE PERIOD

IT is often convenient, in writing for immediate purposes, to accept words and phrases which, though inaccurate, are for the moment popular. This must account for our using the illiterate expression 'Girl of the Period' in the course of this article. A period is exactly equivalent to a cycle; and unless it can be shown that there is anything recurrent in the procession of time, the word is without significance in this popular phrase. Its originator (a lady probably) should have used the word 'era.' Having made this preliminary remark, we shall make use of the phrase when necessary.

Imperial Rome takes very high rank among the great cities of the world is second perhaps to London only. The English are a superior race to the Romans intellectually and physically. This is already certain, though we have seen the Roman race at its highest point of development, while as yet the English have not reached that point. Questionless there are matters wherein the Romans surpassed us. They built stronger bridges, laid firmer roads, made terser and clearer laws, wrote sharper satire. They were madder in their luxury and more shameless in their vice. They were a strong and resolute people, but devoid of originality, which especially appears in their literature. Their drama and epic and history were all borrowed from the Greeks; even so was their art. Their satire was original; it sprang from the depth of their social degradation, the hideous character of their vice, as phosphoric exhalations arise from fetid morasses. Satire apart, they had but one original writerCatullus. He, indolent aristocrat and aristologist, has left us a few perfect gems, but cared not to do justice to his own genius. We conjecture his power, as we should have to guess at Shakespeare's if he had written nothing but his sonnets and his songs.

What girls were like in Rome we do not learn from this fine gentleman and finer poet. He burned with a mad passion for one woman only, and contemptuously notices others. Nor again from Horace. His lyrics are almost all from Greek sources, and the women he names-Cinara and perhaps Lydia excepted-are names and nothing more. But there is one writer whose brilliant pages reflect for us the very life of Rome under Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan―ay, and the girls of that period are as vividly photographed as it is possible for the most expert of contemporary artists to depict the girls of this present day. That writer is Marcus Valerius Martialis, whose name we have shortened to Martial. In about