when he was engaged in making verses; his spirit he says was lost if at such times he tasted meat and drink; "even," he adds, "if I take a glass of wine I cannot write a line." Sir Henry Wotton gives a curious account of Father SarpiMacaulay's favourite historian, and the author of the famous 'History of the Council of Trent': "His manner was to sit fenced with a castle of paper about his chair and above his head, for he was of our Lord of St. Albans' opinion, that air is predatory, and especially hurtful when the spirits are most enlarged." William Prynne, the voluminous author of the 'Histriomastrix,' was nothing "without a long quilted cap which came an inch over his eyes." Buffon was helpless without a spotless shirt and a starched frill. Still stranger were the whims of Graham, the author of 'The Sabbath,' and Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who, if we are to believe De Quincey, found their vein never ran happily unless they sat down to their tasks with boots and spurs on. An eminent modern novelist finds his pen and his imagination powerless unless he sits surrounded by lighted candles in a darkened room, and Horace Walpole tells us that Lord Orrery found no stimulus so efficacious as a sharp fit of the gout. The great Dutch scholar, Isaak Vossius, and our own poet, John Philipps, would employ a servant to comb their hair whilst they meditated their works. Coleridge told Hazlitt that when engaged in composition he never found his vein so happy as when he was walking over uneven ground, or making his way through a coppice with the twigs brushing his face. Wordsworth on the other hand preferred a straight gravel walk where he could wander mechanically and without any impediment to and fro; in this way almost all his later poems were composed. Lord Bacon had a fancy for inhaling the fumes of a bottle of claret poured out on earth which had been newly upturned. But here we must conclude, though we have by no means exhausted our list of the whims and oddities of the strange race to whom the world owes so much. From Heine. ON Life's pathway overshaded, Children, when, in darkness straying, I, a child forlorn advancing, Carol through the darkness drcar; Though the strain be not entrancing, Yet it drives away the fear W. D. SCOONES. A Peep at the Moghrebins. II. TANGIER TO TETUAN. THERE was nothing imposing about our little party when it set out from Tangier for Tetuan at half-past six next morning. We numbered three, all told-myself, Mahomet the interpreter, and Atayud the military escort. The soldier and the interpreter were very different types. Atayud was a handsome, sharp-featured fellow, sparing of speech and extravagant in Spanish cigarettes. Deducting the necessary intervals for dinner and the manufacture of these cigarettes, he smoked incessantly from Tangier on to Tetuan, but his collected speeches during the same period, including the remarks (chiefly, I have reason to believe, curses not loud but deep) addressed to his self-willed mule, would have hardly furnished matter enough for a verse in the Koran. Mahomet was a zealous, good-humoured Moor of Tangier, whose power of telling minutely circumstantial lies with complete self-possession was decidedly superior to his power over the French and Spanish tongues, both of which he spoke, however, quite well enough for all ordinary purposes. Atayud, again, was something of an exquisite. His under-vestment, snow-white cotton trousers, and a loose claret-coloured tunic of fine cloth, were protected from the defilements of the march by no less than two burnouses, a white one inside and a brown outside, the hood of the second being turned up over the spotless folds of his turban. But Mahomet was, frankly, a ragamuffin. A very short jacket, once red, and of much the same cut as the garment usually worn in public by the monkeys of Italian organmen, a fez cap of the same stuff, and a rag of white burnous, not too long to impede the free play of nervous bronzed legs bared high above the knee, made up the interpreter's simple outfit. It was the lightest marching order, but not a bit too light; for Mahomet on foot had to keep pace through the long hot day of ten hours with Atayud and myself on mule-back. Passing northward out of Tangier, we skirted the smooth sea-beach for a few minutes, and then striking inland between lofty dunes of pure loose sand, apparently wind-drifted, we entered a narrow valley plain bounded by rolling hills. It was a naked, monotonous landscape, toned down to a uniform dun tint by long exposure to the summer suns. There was absolutely no verdure, properly so called, to be seen on any side. Clumps of the chamærops, or dwarf-palm, were thickly sprinkled all over the fields and hill-slopes, where not directly under cultivation, but their dark sap-green looked black at a little distance; and the effect of the stiff aloes forming living chevaux de frise round the groups of mud huts, perched here and there on the hill-tops, was precisely the same as if the plants had been cast in copper, and left for the air to rust over with a coating of verdigris. Now and then we passed a small garden patch, shut in by impenetrable hedges of the nopal-cactus or Indian fig, that oddest of all plants to the stranger from North Europe, whose sense of botanical propriety is shocked by seeing erect strings of leathery leaves take the place of branches, and finding the bright yellow flowers and prickly fruit growing where they have clearly no right to grow-around the edges of the leaves. Dry and arid as the soil looked here, broken by long-continued heat into a network of cracks, it was evidently fertile, for good patches of dourra, the heavyeared Egyptian wheat, still stood at intervals along the track, and wide stretches of stubble marked the place of crops already harvested. For the first hour of our march, the road was enlivened by quaint picturesque groups of country Moors, hurrying in towards Tangier with country produce for the markets, packed on the backs of wonderfully small asses, the national beasts of burden in Marocco. Grandly proportioned old Moors, with flowing beards and grave mild eyes, sobered down to a nil admirari expression by years and fatalism, came jogging along seated on these miniature donkeys, with their long legs thrust out forwards, beyond the asses' ears, so as to keep the yellow slippered feet clear of the ground. It was impossible to look at such a picture and keep down a broad grin; but I felt my levity rebuked when I caught the dark eyes of these old stoics turned on me more in sorrow than in anger. There was a painful side, however, to these quaint trains of Moorish pack-asses, for many of the brave, patient little brutes were cruelly overladen, and their harness galled them horribly, leaving raw sores, to which no one seemed to pay the least heed. It was not easy to get a glimpse at the features of the Moorish women, who followed their mounted lords on foot. As soon as they caught sight of the strange men escorting the infidel, up went their face-cloths till nothing more was left uncovered than a pair of dark eyes, which scrutinised me keenly from under the shade of enormous straw hats. Some of these country Fatimas, however, were so hampered by the infants slung behind their backs after the manner of Indian squaws, and some again were so negligent in the discharge of their religious duty, that one had ample time to gaze on their ugliness before the hideous face-cloth was adjusted. On the two days' march from Tangier to Ceuta, I did not see a single pretty face belonging to a Moorish woman; all were hard and swarthy and toil-worn. The face-cloth, however, hiding all but the eyes, which are generally large and lustrous, gives full scope to a stranger's imagination, leading him on the omne ignotum pro magnifico principle to picture a possible peri behind each veil. Little more than an hour's march took us into an upland plain shut in on the right by undulating hills, and sweeping up gradually on the left towards the rocky peaks which overlook the Straits of Gibraltar. Directly in front was a range of mountains, across which lay our track to Tetuan, and high up on one of the lower ridges of this range, Mahomet pointed me out a gleaming white speck. This was Fondaque, a station where, I had been told, it was usual for travellers by this route to stop and dine at mid-day. There was not a tree in sight here on any side, nothing to mar the suave contour of the hills and upland pastures, where drowsy flocks of sheep and goats, numerous as the flocks of the patriarchs, roamed idly among the dark tufts of dwarf-palm. Now and then we crossed a dried watercourse where clusters of oleander bushes with bright pink blossoms sheltered from the sun; tall shafts of the Scilla maritima, the medicinal squill, shot up leafless to a height of five feet with their spikes of white flowers; and the air was scented with the yellow-flowered mint from which the Moors concoct their fragrant tea. There was a quiet charm in the wide free stretch of this naked upland, sleeping so silently under the rich glow of the sunlight, that the tramp of the mule-hoofs, and the patter of Mahomet's naked feet, seemed to be echoed from the distant hills. Atayud the taciturn was a picturesque figure as he led the way here, seated on his mule, rigid as a statue, the pointed hood of his burnous standing out in clear outline, and his long Arab firelock swathed in a flaming cover of crimson cloth laid across the pommel of his saddle. This weapon may have had an excellent moral effect, as symbolising the authority of the Sultan, but it was, certainly, not formidable in itself. It was so tightly buttoned up in its cover and required such careful adjustment, the barrel being inclined to move independently of the stock, that before the ponderous flint-lock could have been brought into action, we might have been conveniently massacred by the least enterprising of Moorish footpads. About ten o'clock we commenced to mount the hill-slope towards Fondaque, and immediately my mule began to develope a very awkward peculiarity. The path here was broken by frequent gullies, and these the mule took in the same way as the drivers of the Connemara stage-cars take the dips in the road from Clifden to Galway, with a rush headlong downhill so as to gather momentum enough to carry the opposite slope. There is a pleasurable excitement in this way of doing the bad bits on the Connemara car, for the top-heavy machine may swing over at |