Pittston Gazette

              e»tHlDU«liCxl 1H50. vol- XLVL11 S«. Wi V Oldest Newspaper in the Wyoming Valley. PITTSTON, LUZERNE COUNTY, PA., FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1898. A Weekly Local and Family Journal. j mi 00 » Ife r i iii Ailvanrta „jp- HALL CAINC" V~2~ , AUTHOR Of "THE SCAPEGOAT.** 1 "the Bondman " "the peemster"Etc. /Ik 4 / MM w/f my nerves wf.s at tault, but indeed i felt that in hia way, in his degree, , | within the measure of hia possibilities. eunuch or midwife." scriptions at the gate, the "Koran" on the scalfs hung out at the bazaars and 011 the satchels hawked in the streets, and 011 the other side shameless lying, cheating, usury, buying and selling of justice, cruelty and inhumanity, raw sores on the backs of the asses, blood in the streets, blood, blood, blood everywhere, and secret corruption indescribable.j lenly and made some answer in hot and mpid words. _ The man of the saint's house spoke again, showing his teeth is he did so in a horrible grin, and at the next instant, almost quicker than my eyes could follow the swift move, inents of his hands, the Berber had plucked his long knife from his belt uid plunged it in the keeper's breast. I saw it all. The man fell at my feet uid was dead in an instant. In another moment the police of the market had laid hold of the murderer, and he was being hauled off to his trial. "Come," whispered my guide, and he led me by ihort cuts through the narrow lanes to the kasbash. into the old one until I had lighted by chance upon the slave market in front of the ruins of the ancient grand mosque and upon a human auction which was then proceeding. No scene so full of shame had 1 ever beheld, but the fascination of the spectacle held me, and I stood and watched and listened. Tho slave being sold was a black girl, and she was beautiful according to the standard of her skin, bareheaded, barefooted and clad as lightly over her body as decency allowed. ana saiiow ana wild eyea, nervous ana glooiuy and morose. One day he stopped me and said, "I know now what your Buckshot Poster di»d of." And then he went on without another word. loath to conless to tnem, naving no positive reasons whatever and no negative grounds except the fact that I was receiving no letters, but 1 gave him a full history of my boy's case, described each stage of it in the past, foretold its probable developments in the future, indicated with elaborate care the treatment necessary at every point and foreshadowed the contingencies under which it might in the end become malignant and even deadly unless stopped by the operation that 1 had myself, after years of labor, found the art of making. Little as I knew then of the Moors and their country, 1 foresaw the dangers of such an enterprise, and 1 warned him against it. "You will get yourself intouwkwurd corners, " 1 said. , that jxxDr fellow of another skin, anoth{er tongui), with whom I had exchanged no word of greeting, hail that day giv. en his life for uiiuo. But about ten days after onr first meeting in the slave market he stopped me again and said quite cheerfully: " He has gone home. I'm satisfied of that "Yes," he said, "and 1 shall got myself out of them." How much of such emotion 1 expressed at the time it is hard to remember now, but that the American gathered tho bent of my feelings was clear to me by the pains he was at to show that they were uncalled for and unnatural and false. What was life? i had set too great a store by it The modern reverence for life was eating away the finest instincts of man's nature. Life was not the most sacred of our possessions. Duty, justice, truth, these were higher things. 1 remembered his doctrine propounded on the ship, and I saw that he was a man of resolution, but 1 said: "Remember, you are going to the land of this people for amusement alone. It is not necessity that thrusts you upon their prejudice, their superstition and their fanaticism." now.." Nevertheless I concluded that my nervous malady must have given me the dark glasses through which everything looked so foul, and I resolved in the interests of health to push on toward Fez as soon as letters arrived from home assuring me that all were well and happy there. "Thank God!" I answered involun- tarily. "Ah." he said, with a twinkle of the eye. " Who says that a man must hang up his humanity on the peg with his hat in the hospital hall when he goes to be a surgeon? If the poet Keats had got over the first shock to his sensibilities he might have been the greatest surgeon of his day." "Now, brothers," cried the salesman, "look, see" (pinching the girl's naked arms and rolling his jeweled fingers from her chin downward over lier bare neck on to her bosom); "sound of wind and limb and with rosy lips, fit for the kisses of a king. How much?" I spent an afternoon in the writing of this letter, and when it was done I felt as if a burden that had been on my back for ages had suddenly been lifted away. Then I went out alone to post it The time was close to evening prayers, and as I walked through the streets the talebs and tradesmen, with their prayer mats under their arms, were trooping into the various mosques. Going by the Karneein mosque, I observed that the good Muslimeen were entering it by hundreds. "Some special celebration," I thought My heart was light, my eyes were alert, and my step was quick. For the first time since my coming to the city Fez seemed to me a beautiful place. The witchery of the scenes of the streets took hold of me. To be thus transported into a world of 2,000 years ago gave me the delight of magic. COPYRIGHT. 1897. Br THE AUTHOR "True," he said, "but if I get into trouble among tbem it will not be my amusements but my liberty or my life that will be in danger." uicaie wirn me oy ine bwuito iiiouin available, lor neither the width of the earth nor the wealth of the world nor the loss of all chances of health or yet life should keep me from hastening home if the one hope of my heart was in peril. Wenman had smiled a little as if in pity of the morbidity that ran out to meet so many dangers. I did not heed his good natured compassion or contempt, whatever it was, for I knew he had no children I had reoouciled myself in some measure to my absence from home, and before my little man was awake in the morning I was gone from the house. In an open alcove of the castle I found two men in stainless blue jellabs and CHAPTER L But no letters came, and at the arrival of every fresh mail from Cadiz and from Gibraltar my impatience increased, At length I decided to wait no longer, and leaving instructions that my letters si»uld be sent on after me to the capital I called on the English consul for such official documents as were needful for my journey. Father, do not leave ma Wait only a little longer. You cannot absolve me? [ am not penitent? How can I be penitent? I do not regret it? How can I regret it? I would do it again? How could I help but do it again? "Then in such a case you will stick at nothing to plow your way out?" "A hundred dollars 1" cried a voice out of the crowd. I thought I had heard the voice before and looked up to seo who had spoken. It waa a tall man with haik over his turban and blue selam on top of a yellow caftan "You'll be more careful in future," I said, "not to cross the fanaticism of these fanatics?" So he talked that day and the next, until from thoughts of the loss of the lascar we had drifted far into wider and more perilous speculations. The '1 ~~ri " "Nothing." I laugiied, for my mind refused to believe him, and we laughed noisily together, with visions of bloody daggers before the eyes of both. He smiled and asked if I knew the Karueein mosque. I told him I had seen it. Yea, yes, I know, I know. Who knows it so well as I? It is written in the tables of God's law. Thou ahait do to murder? But was it murder? Was it crime? Blood? Yes, it was the spilling of blood. Blood will have bloofl, you My. But is there no difference? Hear me oat Let rye It i. bard to remember all now—and here—lying here —but listen, only listed. Then tell me "A hundred dollars offered," cried the salesman, "only a hundred! Brothers, now's the chance for all true believers 1" "It is the greatest in Marocco," he said. "The Moors say the inner court stands on 800 pillars. I don't believe them, and I mean to-see for myself." I found it useless to protest, and he went his way laughing at my blanched and bewildered face. "That man," I thought, "is fit to be the hero of a tragedy, and he is wasting himself on a farce." Father, my heart believed. Silently, secretly, unconsciously it drank in the poison of his thought—drank it in, aye— When these had been procured from the kasbnh and I was equipped for travel, the consul inquired of me how I liked the Moors and their country. I described my conducting impressions, and be said both were right in their several ways. Next day about noou we sailed for Tangier. Uur ship was the Jackal, a little old iron steam tug, battered by time and tempest, clamped and stayed at every side, and just holding together as by the grace of God. The stonn which we had outraced from Finistere had now doubled Cape St Vincent, and the sea was rolling heavily in the straits. We saw nothing of this until we had left the bay and were standing out from l'arife, nor would it be worthy of mention now but that it gave me my first real understanding of the tremendous hold that the faith or the fanaticism of the Moorish people—call it what you will—has upon their characters and lives. "A hundred and five!" cried another voice. "A hundred and ten 1" "A hundred and fifteen!" It had been arranged that I should go to Marocca Wenman had suggested that country out of regard to the freshness of its life and poople. The east in the west, the costumes of Arabia, the "The religion of the Moor," said he, "is genuine of its kind, though it does not put an end to the vilest government un earth and the most loathsome immoralities ever practiced by man. Islam is a sacred thing to him. He i8 proud of it, jealous of it and prepared to die for it. Half his hatred of the unbeliever is fiar that the Nazarene or the Jew is eager to show his faith some dishonor, and that," added the consul, "reminds me to offer you one word of warning— avoid the very shadow of offense to the religion of these people, do not pry into their beliefs, do not take note of their ordinances, pass their mosques and saints' house* with downcast eyes if need be; in a word, let Islam alone." • "A hundred and fifteen for this jewel of a girl!" cried the salesman. "It's giving her away, brothers. By the prophet, if you are not quick I'll keep her for myself. Come, look at her, Sidi. Isn't she good enough for a sultan? The prophet (God rest him) would have leaped at her. He loved sweet women as much as he loved sweet odors. Now for the third and last time—how much? Remember, I guarantee her 17 years of age, sound, strong, plump, sweet—and intact" if I did wrong No, tell me if God himself will not justify me—aye, justify me though I outraged his edict. Blasphemy? Ah, father, douot go. Father— When 1 reached the English postoffice, I found it shut np. On its shatters behind its iron grating a notice board was hang out, saying that the office was temporarily closed for the sorting of an incoming mail and the dispatch of an outgoing one. There was a little crowd of people waiting in front—chiefly Moorish servants of English visitors for the window to open again, and near by stood the horses of the postal couriers pawing the pavement. I dropped my letter into the slit in the window and then stood aside to see if the mail had brought anything for me at last. Meanwhile I had a shadow over my own life which would not lift. That letter which I had received from home at the moment of leaving Tangier had haunted me throughout the journey. Its brevity, its insufficiency, its delay and above all its conspicuous omission of all mention of our boy had given rise to endless speculation. Every dark possibility that fancy could devise had risen before me by way of explanation. I despised myself for such weakness, but 6elf contempt did nothing to allay my vague fears. The child was ill—I knew it, I felt it, I could swear to it as cer- Plunged it into the keeper's heart. ipotless white turbans squatting on rush nate at either foot of the horseshoe trch. These were the judges, the cadi tnd his caliph, sitting in session in the tall of justice. faiths of Mohammed and of Moses, a primitive form of government and a social life that might have been proper to the land of Canaan in the days of Abraham, such had seemed to him and others to bo an atmosphere of novelty that was likely to bring spring and elasticity to the overstretched mind and nerves of a victim of the civilization of our tumultuous century. But not in all the world could fate have ferreted out for me a scene more certain to develop the fever and fret of my natural temperament Had the choice fallen on any other place, any dead or dying country, any corner of God's earth but that blighted and desolate land— It ia less than a year since my health broke down, but the soul lives fast, and it seems to me like a lifetime. 1 had overworked myself miserably. My life u a physician in London had been a hard one, but it was not my practice that had wrecked me. How to perform that operation on the throat was the beginning of my trouble. You know what happened. 1 mastered my problem, and they called the operation by my name. It has brought me fame, it has made me rich, it has saved a thousand lives, and will save ten thousand more, and yet I —I—for taking one life—one—under conditions— There was a tumult of many voices tnd of hurrying feet, and presently the police entered holding their prisoner between them and followed by a vast joncourse of townspeople. I held my jround in front of the alcove, the Ber- Der was brought up near to my side, ind I saw and heard all. "A hundred and twenty!" cried the voice I had heard first. I looked up at the speaker again. It was the American in his Moorish costume. The channel at that point is less than 20 miles wide, but we were more than five hours crossing it. Gur little crazy craft labored terribly in the huge breakers that swept inward from the Atlantic. Pitching until tho fort-deck was covered, rolling until her boats dipped in the water, creaking, shuddering, I could bear no more of the Bickening spectacle, and as I turned aside with my interpreter I was conscious that my companion of the voyage was following rue. When we came to some dark arcades that divide old Fez from new Fez, the American spoke, and I sent my interpreter ahead. I thanked him for his counsel, and, remembering the American, I inquired what the penalty would be if a foreign subject offended the religion of this people. The consul lifted his eyebrows and shoulders together, with an eloquence of reply that required no words. "This man," said one of the police, 'killed So-and-so of Sidi Gali's saint's aouse." The window was thrown up, and two letters were handed to me through the grating over the heads of the Moors, who were crushing underneath. I took them with a sort of fear and half wished at the first moment that they might be from strangers. They were from home. One was from my wife. I knew the envelope before looking at the handwriting. The other was from Wenman. Ah, bear with me, bear with me! I sailed to Gibraltar by a P. and 0. St earner from Tilbury, and the tender that took my wife back to the railway pier left little in my new condition to interest me. You know what it is to leave England in search of health. If hope is before you, regret is behind. When 1 stood on the upper deck that uight alone and watched the light of the Eddystone dying down over the dark waters, it seemed to nie that success bad no solace and fame no balm and riches no safety or content. One reflection alone sufficed to reconcile me to where I was—the work that had brought me there was done neither for fame nor for riches, but at the prompting of the best of all earthly passions or what seemed to be the best. leaping, she had enough to do to keep afloat "When?" said the cadi. "This moment," said the police. "How?" said the cadi. Father, bear with me. I will tell all. My nerves were burned out. Gloom, depression, sleeplessness. prostration, sometimes oollapse, a oonsuming fire within, a paralyzing frost without—you know what it is—we call it— With the American I occupied the bridge between the paddle boxes, which served as saloon for first class passengers, and below us in the open hold of the afterdt ck a number of Moors sat huddled together among cattle and 6heep and baskets of fowls. They were pilgrims, hadjis, returning from Mecca by way of Gibraltar, and their behavior during the passage was marvelous in its callousness to the sense of peril. They wrangled, quarreled, snarled at each other, made peace, embraced, kissed, laughed togetber, made futile attempts to smoke their koef pipes and quarreled, barked and bleated again. "With this knife," said the police. "But might not a wanger," I "do so unwittinglyir" The knife, stained and still wet, was banded to the judge. He shook it and asked the prisoner one question, "Why?" "You see I am giving myself full tether in this execrable land," he said. "Indeed you are," I answered. Where I stood on the upper deck that "Truly," he answered, "and so much the worse for his ignorance." "Well, as the Romans in Rome, you know—it was what I came for," he said. I read Wenman's letter first. Good or bad, the news must be broken to me gently. Hardly had I torn the sheet open when I saw what it contained. My little Noel had been ilL He was still so, but not seriously, and I was not to be alarmed. The silence on their part which I had complained of so bitterly had merely been due to their fear of giving me unnecessary anxiety. For his part (Wenman's) he would have written before, relying on my manliness and good sense, but my wife had restrained him, .saying she knew me better. There was no cause for apprehension. The boy was going along as well as could be expected, etc. I watched the progress of my disease and gave myself the customary treatment. Hygiene, diet, drugs, electricity. 1 tried them all. But neither dumbbells nor Indian clubs, neither walking nor riding, neither liberal food nor doaes of egg and brandy, neither musk new ergot nor antipyrin, neither faradization nor galvanization availed to lift the black shades that hung over me day and night, and made the gift of life ' a mockery. 1 knew why. My work possessed me like a fever. 1 could neither do it to my content nor leave it undone. I was drawing water in a sieve. ntyhi alone. "Is British life, then,"I said, "at the mercy of the first ruffian with a dagger? Is there no power in solemn treaties?"Then the Berber flung himself on his knees—his bald head brushed my hand —and began to plead extenuating circumstance. "It is true, my lord, I killed him, but be called me dog and infidel and spat at me"— American held to his canon. War was often better than peace and open massacre than corrupt tranquillity. We wanted some of the robust spirit of the middle ages in these our piping days. The talk turned on the persecution of the Jews in Russia The American defended it A stern people was purging itself of an alien element which, like an mterminate tapeworm, had been preying on its vitals. The remedy was drastic, but necessary. Life was lost, but also lite '' Take care,'' I replied. '' Take care.'' He drew up shortly and said, "By the way, I ought to be ashamod to meet you." '' What are treaties," he said," against fanaticism? Give the one a wide berth and you'll have small need for the other." The cadi gave back the knife and waved his hand. "Take him away," he laid. I thought he ought, but for courtesy I asked him why. After that he told me something of certain claims just settled for long imprisonment inflicted by the Moorish authorities on men trading under the protection of the British flag. It was an abject story of barbarous cruelty, broken health, shattered lives and wrecked homes, atoned for after weary procrastination, in the manner of all oriental courts, by a sorry money payment The moral of it all was conveyed by the consul in the one word with which he parted from me at his gate. "Respect the fanaticism of these fanatics," he said, "as you would value your liberty or your life and keep out of a Moorish prison. Remember that, remember that." "Because," said he, "I have failed to act up to my principles." That was all, as my guide interpreted it. "Come,"he whispered again, and be led me by a passage into a sort of closet where a man lay on a mattress. This was the porch to the prison, and the man on the mattress was the jailer. In one wall there was a low door, barred and clamped with iron and having a round peephole grated across. "In what?" I inquired. "In saving the life of a scoundrel at the risk of my own," he answered. Life on the ship was what I had found it before. The first inspections, the secret inquiries as to who was who, the salutations, the little playful facetiae, the gaps at table as the wind freshened and the sea rose, the watching of the chart which recorded progress, then the quoits on deck in the morning sunshine, the smoking and joking and ban- Jo playing in the deckhouse at night, the ladies and the piano in the saloon at teatime—1 had seen it all a score of times already, it had no interest for me now. and in my indifference to my surroundings I must have been but a moody oumrade to my companions of the voyage. "Surely," I said, "these people are either wondrously brave or they have no sense of the solemnity of death." was saved Then he told me his story. "I left Tangier," he said, "with four men in my caravan, but it did not suit me to bring them into Fez, so I dismissed them a day's ride from here, paying in full for the whole journey and making a present over. My generosity was a blunder. The Moor cannot comprehend an act of disinterested kindness, and I saw the ruffians lay their heads together to find out what it could mean. Three of them gave it up and went off home, but the fourth determined to follow the tracc. His name was Larby. He was my guide and a most brazen hypocrite, always cheating me. I let him do so. It amused me—always lying to my face and always fumbling his beads, with 'God forgive me, God forgive me'—an appropriate penance; you know the way of it. 'Peace Sidi,' said the rascal. Farewell. Allah send we meet in paradise.' But the devil meant that we should meet before that. We have met. It was a hot moment. L/o yon know the Hamadsha mosque? It is a place in a side street sacred to the preaching of a fanatical follower of one Sidi Ali bin Hamdoosh and to certain wild dances executed in a glass and fire eating frenzy. I thought I should like to hear a Moorish D. L. Moody, and one day I went there. As I was going in I met a man coming out It was Larby. 'Beeba!' he whispered, with a tragic start—that was his own name for me on the journey. 'Keep your tui "ue between vour teeth.' I whisnered Dack. "1 was tteeoa yesterday; muaj I'm Sidi Mohammed.' Then I entered. I spread my prayer mat, chanted my first sura, listened to a lusty sermon and came out. There, as I expected, in the blind lane leading from the Hamadsha to the town, was Larby waiting for me. 'Beeba,' said he, with a grin, 'you piny a double hand of cards.' 'Then,' said I, 'take care I don't trump your trick.' The rascal had thought I might bribe him, and when he knew that I would not I saw murder in his face. He had conceived the idea of betraying me at the next opportunity. At that moment he was as surely aiming at my life as if he had drawn his dagger and stabbed me. It was then that I disgraced my principles." My wife sent for Gull Full well I knew what he would advise. It was rest I must take six mouths absolute holiday, and in order to cut myself off entirely from all temptations to mental activity 1 must leave London and go abroad. Change of scene, of life and of habit, new peoples, new customs, new faiths and a new climate—these separately and together, with total cessation of my usual occupations, were to banish a long series of functional derangements which had for their basis the exhaustion of the sympathetic nervous system. Then, ooming to closer quarters, we talked of vsiuxder. The American heldi to tbe doctrine of Sterna It was a hard case that the laws of the modern world; should not have mads any manner of difference between murdering an honeat man and only executing a scoundrel These things should always be rated ad valorem. As for blood spilled in self defense, it was folly to talk of it as crime Even the laws of my own effeminate i land justified the man who struck down the arm that was raised to kill him, aodl "Neither," said the American. "They are merely fatalists by virtue of their faith. 'If it is now, it is to come; if it is not to come, then it is now.' " " Why notf" said the American. tainly as if my ears could hear the labored breathing in his throat. Not a word to indicate the nature and degree of the attack. Such an insufficient epistle must have disquieted the veriest nincompoop alive. To send a thing like that to me—to me of all menl Was there ever so gross a mistake of judgment? At the next instant the police brought in their prisoner. The jailer rattled a big key in the lock, the low door swung open, I saw within a dark den full of ghostly figures dragging chains at their ankles, a foul stench came out of it, the prisoner bent his head and was pushed in, the door slammed back, and that was the end. Everything occurred in no more time than it takes to tell it. Nevertheless I went on; so much did my philosophy do for me. But when I got to Fez I walked straightway to the English postoffice to see if there was a letter awaiting me. Of course there was no letter there. I had not reflected that [ had come direct from the port through which the mails had to pass and that if the postal courier had gone by me on the road I must have seen him, which I had not. "There is a sort of bravery in that" I answered. "And oowardioe, too," said the American.The night had closed in when we dropped anchor by the ruins of the mole at Tangier, and I saw no more of the white town than I had seen of it from the strait but if my eyes failed in the darkness my othftr senses served me only too welL The shrieking and yelping of the boatloads of Moors and negroes who clambered aboard to relieve us of our luggage, the stench of the town sewers that emptied into the bay—these were my first impressions of the gateway to the home of Islam. I knew in an instant what the fact must be—my boy was down with that Did congenital infirmity of the throat Surely my wife had told me more. She had. Not by design, but unwittingly, she had revealed the truth to ma Granville Wenman had written to me, she said, explaining everything, and I was not to worry and bother. All that was possible was being done for par darling, and if I were there I could CJo no more. The illness had to have its course; so I must be patient All this is the usual jargon of the surgery—I knew that Wenman had dictated it—and then » true line or two worth all the rest from my dear girl's own bleeding mother's heart. Our Noel was this and that he oom plained of so and so, and first began to look unwell in such and such ways. I did remember it Every day of my travels I remembered it I remembered it at the most awful moment of my life. If I had not remembered it then should I be lying here now with that—with that—behind me I Ah, wait, wait I the mind that reckoned such an act as an jffense was morbid and diseased. i was loath to go. Looking back upon my condition. I see that my reluctance was justified. To Launch a creature who was ail nerves into the perpetual if trifling vexations of .travel was a mistake, a folly, a madness. But 1 did not perceive this. I was thinking only of my home and the dear souls from whom 1 most be separated. During the seven years of oar married life my wife had grown to be more than the object of my love. That gentle soothing, that soft healing Which the mere presence of an affectionate woman who is all strength and courage may bring to a man who is waited by work or worry, my wife's presence had long brought to me, and I shrank from the thought of scenes where she could no longer move about me, meeting my wishes and anticipating my wants. Thus three days parsed, and beyond casual words 1 had spoken to no one. But on the fourth day, as we sailed within sight of Finistere in a calm sea. having crossed the bay with comfort. the word weut round that a storm signal was hoisted on the cape. No one who has goue through an experience inch as that is likely to forget it—everybody (w deck, the blanched faces, the bushed voices, the quick whispers, the eager glances around, the interrogation* of the officers on duty and their bantering answers belied by their anxious looks, then the darkening sky, the freshening breeze, the lowering horizon, ttoe tingling gloomy atmosphere creeping down from the mastheads, and the tur of the whole ship, above and below, i sbarged, as it were, with sudden elec-1 entity. It is like nothing else in life exoepi the bugle coll in camp, telling those who lie smoking and drinking1 *bout the tires that tho enemy is coming I and is near | "Is that all his trial?" I asked. "All," said my guide. "How long will he lie there?" "Until death." I was ashamed before my own consciousness, but, all the same, the postoffice saw me every day. Whatever the direction was that I took with my interpreter it led toward that destination in the end, and whatever the subject of his ceaseless gabble it was forced to come at last to the times and seasons of the mails from England. These were biweekly, with various possibilities of casual arrivals besides. Such opinions were repugnant to me, and 1 tried to resist them. There was a sanctity about human life which no man should dare to outrage. God gave it, and only God should take it away. As for the government of the world, let it be for better or for worse, it was in liod's hands, and God required the help of no man. Little did I expect when I left the consul to light so soon upon a terrible illustration of his words. With my guide and interpreter, a Moorish soldier lent to me by the authorities in return for 2 pisetas (1 shilling and 9 pence) a day, I strolled into the greater sok, the market place outside the walla It was Friday, the holy day of the Moslems, somewhere between 1 and 3 o'clock in the afternoon, when the body of the Moors, having newly returned from their one hour observances in the mosques, had resumed, according to their wont, their usual oocupations. The day was fine and warm, a bright sun was shining, and the sok at the time w hen we entered it was a various and animated scene. "But" I said, "I have heard that a cadi of your country may be bribed to liberate a murderer." 'Ah, my lord is right" said my guide, "but not the murderer of a saint." The American went through the turmoil with composure and an air of command, and having seen to my belongings as well as his own, passing them through the open offloo at the water gate, where two solemn Moors in white sat by the light of candles in the receipt of customs, he parted from me at the foot of the street that begins with the grand mosque and is the main artery of the town, for he had written for rooms to the hotel called the Villa de Prance, and I, before leaving England, had done the same to the hotel called the Continental.Less than five minutes before I had seen the stalwart young Berber swaggering down the hillside in the afternoon sunshine. Now he was in the gloom of the noisome dungeon, with no hope of ever again looking upon the light of day, doomed to drag out an existence worse than death, and all for what? For taking life? No, no, no—life in that land is cheap, cheaper than it ever was in the middle ages—but for doing dishonor to a superstition of the faith of Islam. My resistance was useless. The American held to his doctrine—it was good to take life in a good cause, and if it was good for the nation it was good for the individual man. The end was all. Fez is a noble city, the largest and finest oriental city I had yet seen, fit to compare in its own much different way jf beauty and of splendor with the ?re&t cities of the west, the great citiee of the earth, and of all time, but for me its attractions were overshadowed by the gloom of my anxiety. I fenoed these statements with what force I could command, and I knew not how strongly my adversary had assailed me. Now I know too well that his opinions sank deep into my soul. Only too well I know it now—now that— It was clear as noonday. The attack of the throat which I had foreseen had come. Five years I had looked for it Through five long years I had waited and watched to check it. I had labored day and night that when it should come I might meet it My own health I had wasted, and for what—for fame, for wealth, for humanity, for science? No, no, no, but for the life of my boy, and now, when his enemy was upon him at length, where was I—I who alone in all this world of God could save him? I was 1,800 miles from hornet I slept three streets from the Karueein minarets, but the voice seemed to float into my room in the darkness and soil round my head and ring in my ears. Always 1 was awakened at the first sound of the stentorian "Allahukabar," or if I awoke in the silence and thought with a feeling of relief, "It is over; I have slept through it," the bowling wail would suddenly break in apon my thanksgiving. This was weakness, and I knew it, bat 1 had another weakness which 1 did not know. My boy, a little sou 6 years of age the day before 1 aet sail, was all the world to ma Paternal love may eat up all the other pasdons. It was so in my casa The tyranny of my affection for my only child was even more constant and unrelenting than the tyranny of my work. Nay. the two were one, for oat of my instinct as a father came my strength as a doctor. The boy had ■offered a throat trouble from bis birth. When he was a babe, I delivered him from a fierce attack of it, and when he was 4 I brought him back from the jaws of death. Thus twice 1 had saved his life, and each time that life had become the dearer to ma Bat too well i knew that the mischief was beaten down and not conquered. Some day it would return with awful virulence. To meet that terror I wrought by day and night No slave ever toiled so hard. I denied myself rest, curtailed my sleep and stole from tranquil reflection and repose half boars and quarter hours spent in the carriage going from patient to patient. The attack might come suddenly, and 1 must be prepared. 1 was working against time. We arrived at Gibraltar the following morning, and going up on deck in the empty void of air that follows on the sudden stopping of a ship's engines 1 found the American, amid a group of swarthy Glbraltarians, bargaining for % boat to take him to the mole. It turn-9d out that he was going to Marocco also, and so we hired the boat together. Thither I was led by a barefooted courier in white jellab and red tarboosh, amid sights and sounds of fascinating strangeness—the low drone of men's voices singing their evening prayers in the mosques, the tinkling of the bells of men selling water ont of goat skins, the "Allah" of blind beggars crourhing at the gates, the "Arrah" of the mule drivers, and the hooded shapes going by in the gloom or squatting in the red glare of the cafes without windows or doors and open to the streets. Dense crowds of hooded figures, clad ohiefly in white—soiled or dirty white —men in jellabs, women enshrouded in blankets, barefooted girls, boys with shaveu polls, water carriers with their tinkling bells, snake charmerB, story tellers, jugglers, preachers, and then donkeys, nosing their way through the throng, mules lifting their necks above the people's heads and camels munching oats and fighting—it was a wilderness of writhing forms and a babel of shrieking noises. I remembered the American and shuddered at the sight of this summary justice. Next morning, as my tentmen and muleteers were making ready to set out for Fez, my soldier guide brought me a letter which had come by the French steamer via Malaga. It was from home—a brief note from my wife, with no explanation of her prolonged silence, merely saying that all was as usual at Wimpole street and not mentioning our boy at alL The omission troubl«d me, the brevity and baldness of the message filled me with vague concern, and I had half a mind to delay my inland journey. Would that I bad done so! Would that I had I Oh, would that I had 1 1 was standing on the quarter deck watching the lascars reefing sails, batteniug down the hatches, tarpauling them and making everything snug when a fellow passenger whom I had not observed before stepped up and •poke. His remark was a casual one, tnd it has gone from my memory. I think it had reference to the native seamen and was meant as a jest upon their lumbering slowness, which suggested pitiful thoughts to him of what their' capacity must be in a storm. But the air of the man much more than his words aroused and arrested my attention. It was that of one whoso spirits fcad been quickened by the new sense of itauger. Ho laughed ; his eyes sparkled; bis tongue rolled out his light remarks with a visible relish. I looked at the man and saw that he had the soul of a warhorse. Tall, slight, dark, handsome, with bnshy beard, quivering nostrils, mobile mouth and eyes of Are, alive in every fiber and full of unconquerable energy, he appeared to be a man of 80 to 85, but proved to bo no more than four and twenty. I learned afterward that he was an American and was traveling for love of adventure. Oh, the irony of my fate! My bouI rose in rebellion against it Staggering back through the darkening streets, the whole city seemed dead and damned. The morning was clear and cold. The great broad rock looked whiter and starker and more like a gigantic oyster shell than ever against the blue of the *ky. There would be no steamer for Tangier until the following day, and we were to put up at the Spanish hotel sailed the (Jalpe. There was jutt one fact of life in Fez that gave me a kind of melancholy joy— it nearly every turn of a street my ears were arrested by the multitudinous oackle, the broken, various voiced sfhgsong, of a children's school. These Moorish schools interested me. They were the. simplest of all possible institutes, insisting usually of a nish covered cellar, two sttps down from the street with the teacher, the taleb, often a half blind old man, squatting in the middle of the floor, and his pupils seatad about him, and all reciting together some passages of the Koran, the only textbook of education. One such school was close under my bedroom window. I heard the drone of it as early as 7 o'clock every morning, and as often as I went abroad I stood for a moment and Looked in at the open doorway. A black boy sat there with a basket for the alms of passersby. He was a bright eyed little fellow, 6 or 7 years of age, and he knew one English phrase only. "Come on," he would say and hold up the basket and smile. "What pathetic interest his sunny face had for ine, how he would cheer and touch me, with what strange memories his voice and laugh would startle me, it would be pitiful to tell. How far I walked in this state of oblivion I do not know, but presently out of the vague atmosphere wherein all things had been effaced I became conscious, like one awakening after a drug, of an unusual commotion going on around. People were running past me and across me in the direction of the Karueein mosque. From that place a loud tumult was rising into the air. The noise was increasing with every moment and rising to a babel of human voices. I met the American in the sok—the market place—the following day,'and he took me up to his hotel to see some native costumes which he had bought by way of preparation for his enterprise. They were haiks and selhams, jellabs, kaftans, slippers, rosaries, Korans, sashes, satchels, turbans and tarbooshes—blue, white, yellow and red— all right and none too new, for he had purchased them not at the bazaars, but from the son of a learned Moor, a Taleb, who had been cast into prison by a usurer Jew. With my loquacious Moor I pushed my way along past booths and stalls until I came to a whitewashed structure, with a white flag floating over it, that stood near the middle of the market place. It was a roofless place about 15 feet square and something like a little sheep fold, but having higher walls. Through the open doorway I saw an inner iuclosure out of which a man came forward. He was a wild eyed creature in tattered garments and dirty, disheveled and malevolent of face. Immediately on landing I made my way to the postofflce to dispatch a telegram home announcing my arrival, and there I found two letters, which, having some overland, arrived in advance of me. One of them was from Wenman, telling me that he had called at Wimpolo street the morning after my departure and found all well at my house, uid also inclosing a resolution of thanks and congratulation from my colleagues af the College of Surgeons in relation to my recent labors, which were said to bo "memorable in the cause of humanity and science." "How, how?" I said, though truly I had little need to ask. CHAPTER H. Father, what voice was it that rang in my ears and cried, "Stay, do not travel; all your past from the beginning until today and all your future from today until the end hang on your action now; go, and your past is a waste, your fame a mockery, your success a reproach; remain, and your future is peace and happiness and content"— what voice, father, what voice? "We were alone, I tell you, in a blind lane," said the American, "but I remembered stories the man had told me of his children. 'Little Hoolia' he called bis daughter, a pretty, black eyed mite of 6, who always watohed for him when he was away." At that my disordered senses recovered themselves, and suddenly I became arwwqjthat the tumult was coming in my direction. The noise grew deeper, louder and more shrill at every step. In another moment it had burst upon me ip a whirlpool of uproar. Round the corner of the narrow lane that led to the Karueein mosque a crowd of people came roaring like a torrent. They were Moors, Arabs and Berbers, and they were shouting, shrieking, yelling, yelping and uttering every sound that the human voice can make. At the first instant I realized no more than this, but at the next 1 saw that the people were hunting a man as hounds hunt a wolf. The man was flying before them; he was coming toward me. In the gathering darkness I could see him. His dress, which was Moorish, was torn into shreds about his body. His head was bare. His chest was bleeding. I saw his face. It was the face of the American, my companion of the voyage. "See," said my guide, "see, my lord, a Moorish saint's house. Look at the flag. So shall my lord know a saint's house. Here rest the bones of Sidi Gali, and that is the saint that guards them. A holy man; yes, a holy man. Moslems pay him tribute. Sacred place; yes, sacred. No Nazarene may enter it. But Moslems, yes, Moslems may fly here for sanctuary. Life to the Moslem, death to the Nazarene. So it is." "In these," said he, "I mean to go everywhere, and I'll defy the devil himself to detect me." I was breaking into perspiration. "1 Do you mean," I said, "that you should have"— "Take care," I said, "take caret" I shut my ears to it, aiid six days afterward I arrived at Fez. My journey had impressed two facts upon my mind with startling vividness—first that the Mt»or would stick at notniug in nis jealousy of the honor of his faith and next that I was myself a changed and coarsened man. I was reminded of the one when in El Kassar I saw an old Jew beaten in the open streets because he bad not removed his slippers and walked barefoot as he passed the front of a mosque, and again in Wazzan, when I witnessed the welcome given to the £rand shereef on his return from his home in Tangier to his house in the capital of his province. The Jew was the chief usurer of the town and had half the Moorish inhabitants in his toils, yet his commercial power had counted for nothing against the honor of Islam. "I mean that I should have killed the scoundrel there and then," 6aid the American. You know what happened. The attack did not oome. My boy continued well, but my name became known and my disoovery established. The weakness of my own child had Riven (he bent to my studies. If I had mastered my subject, it was my absorbing love of my little one that gave me the impulse and direction. The other letter was from my wifo, a rweet, affectionate little not®, cheerful yet tender, written on her return from Tilbury, hinting that the dear old house looked just a trifle empty and as if somehow it missed something, but that our boy was up and happy with a new toy that I had left for him as a consolation on his awakening—a great elephant that worked its trunk and roared. "I have just asked our darling," wrote my wife, "what message he would like to send you. 'Tell papa,' he answers, 'I'm ill right, and Jumbo's all right, and is he all right, and will he come home werry quick and see him grunting.' " He laughed and asked me what my own plans were. I told him that I would remain in Tangier until I received letters from home and then push on toward Fez. That night wo flew six hours before the storm, but it overtook our ship at last. What befell us then in the darkness of that rock bound coast 1 did not know until morning. Can you believe it? 1 took my usual dose of a drug prescribed to me for insomnia and lay down to sleep. When I went up on deck in the late dawn of the following day— the time was the spring—the wind had Blackened, and the ship was rolling and swinging along in a sea that could not be heard above the beat and thud of the engines. Only the memory of last night's tempest lay around in sullen wave and sky—only there and in the quarters down below of the native seamen of our ship. "God forbid it," I cried, and my hair rose from my scalp in horror. "Why not?" said the American. "It would have been an act of self defense. The man meant to kill ma He will kill me still if I give him the chance. What is the difference between murder in a moment and murder after 5, 10, 16, 20 days? Only that one is murder in hot blood and haste, and the other is murder in cold blood aud by stealth. Is it life that you think so precious? Then why should I value his life more than I value my own?" "I'll see you there," he said, "but if I do not hail you please do not know me. Good by." My soldier was rattling on in this way when I saw coming in the sunlight, down the hillside of which the 8ok is the foot, a company of some eight or ten men whose dress and complexion were unlike those of the people gathered there. They were a band of warlike persons, swarthy, tall, lithe, sinewy, with heads clean shaven save for one long lock that hung from the crown, each carrying a gun with barrel of prodigious length upon his shoulder, and also armed with a long naked Reefian knife stuck in the scarf that served him for a belt. But 1 bad paid my penalty. My btalth was a wreck, and I must leave everything behind me. If it had been possible to take my wife and boy along with me, how different the end might have been I Should 1 be lving here now —here on this bed—with you, father, fou— "Goodby," I said, and so we parted Bear with ma I was far from my own darling, I was in a strange land, I was a weak man for all that I was thought so strong, and my one besetting infirmity—more consuming than a mother's love— was preyed upon by my failing health, which in turn was preying upon it. I staid ten days longer in Tangier, absorbed in many reflections, of which I shivered and could say nothing. We spent oar boy's birthday with what cheer we oould, command. For my wife it seemed to be a day of qui«t happiness, hallowed by precious memories, the dearest and most delicious that • mother ever knew, of the babyhood of her boy. his pretty lisp, his foolish prattle, his funny little ways ud sayings, and sweetened by the anticipation of the health that was to return to me as the result of rest and shange. The child himself was bright ftod gamesome, and 1 for my part gave way to some reckless and noisy jollity. That night at the Calpe I had some farther talk with the American. Young is he was, he bad been a great eastern traveler. Egypt, Arabia, Syria, the Holy Land—he knew them all. For his forthcoming sojourn in Marooco he had prepared himself with elaborate care. ; The literature of travel in Barbary is ! voluminous, but he had gone through the best of it With the faith of Islam tie had long been familiar, and the cori rupt and tyrannical form of government ; of Mulai el Hassan and his kaids and ; kadis he had an intimate knowledge. ; He had even studied the language of the Moorish people—the Maroccan Arabic, I which is a dialect of the language of j the Koran—and so that he might hold ! intercourse with the Sephardic Jews I also, who people the niellahs of Marocso, he had mastered the Spanish language as well. This extensive equipment, sufficient to start a crusader or to make a revolution, was meant to do more than provide him with adventure. His intention was to see the country and its customs, to observe the manners of the people and the ordinances of their religion. "I : shall get into the palaces and the prisjons of the Kashas," he said, "yes, and the mosques and the saints' bouses, and the harems also if it is possible to play "You think me a monster." said the American, "but remember sinoe we left England the atmosphere has changed." And if the sights of the streets brought me pain or pleasure that was akin to pain, what of the sights, the visions, the dreams of my own solitary mind? I oould not close my eyes in the darkness but I saw my boy. His little child ghost was always with me. He never appeared as I had oftenest seen him—laughing, romping and kicking up his legs ou the hearth rug. Sometimes he came as he would do at home after he had committed some childish trespass and I had whipped him—opening the door of my room and stepping one pace in quietly, nervously, half fearfully to say good' night and kiss me at his bedtime, and I would lift my eyes and see over the shade of my library lamp his little sober red and white face just dried of its recent tears. He saw me, too, and at that instant hp tnmed p'hort "nii +v'1 -- Continued on Page Two The first face 1 encountered was that of the American. He had been on deck all night, and be told me what bad happened. Through the dark hours the storm had been terrible, and when the first dead light of dawn had crept Sffifoss from the east the ship bad been still tossing in great white billows. Just then a number of lascars had been ordered aloft on some urgent duty—I know not what—and a sudden gust had swept one of them from a cross tree into the sea. Efforts had been made to rescue him, the engines had been reversed, boats put out and life buoys thrown into the water, but all in vain. The man had been swept away. He was gone, and the ship had steamed on. They were Berbers, the descendants of the raoe that peopled Barbary before the Moors set foot in it, between whom and the Moors there is a long continued, suppressed but ineradicable enmity. From their mountain homes these men had come to tbe town that day on their pleasure or their business, and as they entered it they were at no pains to oonceal their contempt for the townspeople and their doings. "I," said he to me that night in the Jewish inn, the Fondak, "I, who could clap every man of them in the kasbuh, and their masters with them, for moneys they owe me, I to be treated like a dog by these scurvy sons of Ishmael— God of Jacob!" The grand shereef was a drunkard, a gamester and a fornicator. There was no ordinance of Mohammed which he had not openly outraged, yet because he stood to the people as the descendant of the prophet aud the father of the faith they groveled on the ground before him and kissed his robes, his knees, his feet, his stirrups and the big hoofs of the horse that carried him. As for myself, I realized that the atmosphere of the country had corrupted me, when I took out from my baggage a curved knife in its silver mounted sheaf which I had bought of a hawker at Tangier and fixed it prominently in the belt of my norfolk jacket. The morning after my arrival in Fez I encountered my American companion of the voyage. Our meeting was a 1 strange one. I had rambled aimlessly I with my guide through the new town "Remember, too," I said, "that this man can do you no harm unless you intrude yourself upon his superstitions again. Leave the country immediately. Depend upon it, he is following you." JjKr of the Globe for W rheumatism! H and iHmflttT Complaints, I and prepared under tbe stringent MEDICAL LAWS.^ prescribed by emine- tphyiimansr^^S Kfi) DR. BICHTER'S (Eji " ANCHOR fPAIN EXPELLERl I World renowned! Remarkably successful! ■ ■ Only genuine with Trade Mark" Anchor,"■ ■f. id. Bidferfti*., 215 Pearl St., Hew York. ■ 1 31 HIGHEST AWARDS. 13 Branch Houses. Own Glassworks, ■ Vadoraed A recommended by JB G. C. GUck, 50N. Ma!n St.; J 4 N. Main St.; I «ANCHOR" STOMAOHAIa beat fori " That's not possible," said the American, "for I am following him. Until I come up with him I can do nothing, and my existence is not worth a pin's purchase." I shuddered, and we parted. My mind told me that he was right, but my heart clamored above the voice of reason and said, "You could not do it, no—not to save a hundred hundred lives."» Thus the boors passed until bedtime, ud then, as 1 saw the little fellow tucked up in his orib, it crossed my mind for a moment that be looked less well than usual. Such fancies were common to me, and 1 knew from long experience that It was folly to give way to them. To do so at that time must have been weakness too pitiful for my manhood I had already gone far enough for my own self respect To pay old colleague and fellow student, Granville Wenman, 1 had given elaborate instructions for all possible contingencies.Thither I was led hy a barefooted courier. the strangest were these two—first that the Moors were the most religious people in the world and next that they were the most wickedly irreligious and basely immoral race on God's earth I was prompted to the one by observa- Swaggeriug along with long strides, they whooped and laughed and plowed their way through the crowd over bread and vegetables spread out on the nrnnnH iinrl the.wonle fell hack hefore diem with muttered curses until they were come near to the saint's house beride which I myself with my guide was itonding. Then I saw that the keeper }f the saint's house, the half distraught :reature whom I had just observed, was spitting out at tliein some bitter and venomous words. , Ah, father, how little we know ourselves—how little, oh, how little! When i I think that he shrank back—he who held life so cheap—while I—I who hel£ it so dear, so sacred, so godlike— Bear with me. I will tell all. ' I met the American at intervals during the next six days. We did not often speak, but as we passed in the streets— he alone, I always with my loquacious While I was indulging this weakness, the conviction was deepening in my mind that my boy was ill. So strong did this assurance become at length that though 1 was ashamed to give way to it so far as to set my face toward home, being yet no better for my holiday , I sat down at length to write a letter to Wenman—I had written to my wife by every mail—that I might relieve my pent up feelings. I said nothing to him of my misgivings, for I was The disaster saddened me inexpressibly. I could see the lascar fall from the rigging, catch the agonizing glance of the white eyes in his black face as he was swept past on the crest of a wave, and watch his outstretched arms as he sank to his death down and down and down. It seemed to mean iniquity that while this had happened I had slept Perhaps the oversensitive condition of tion of the large part which Allah ap- pears to play in all affairs of Moorish life anil to the other by clear proof of the ninch larger jiart which the devil enacts in Allah's garments. On the one side prayers, prayers, prayers, the mooddeu, the moodden, the moodden, the mosque, the mosque, the mosque, "Allah" in the mouths of the beggars, "Allah" from the lips of the merchants. "Mohammed" on the in- Clearly they all heard him, and most Df them laughed derisively and pushed lu. But one of the number—a young Uerber with eves of fire—drew up sud- iuterpreter—I observed with dread the If this happened, he was to do that; If that happened, ho was to do this. In eaae of serious need lie was to commu- change that the shadow of death hang-1 ing over a man's head can bring to pass (in his face aud manner. ilu grew thin