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The other, a blond boy who looked not a day over sixteen, announced that he was an Alsatian who had come to Algeria as a waiter in a restaurant car, on purpose to join the Legion, and escape military service as a German. "I shall serve my five years, and become a French subject," he said joyously. "Take hold of my arm. Not bad, is it, for biceps? For what age would you take me?"
Some go to Algeria to prove their hereditary bravery and obtain the Cross of Honor they are deprived of here; others retire to their châteaux and study the fine arts, thus enjoying the only generous resource of discouraged souls; surrounded by the true and the beautiful, they try to forget an ungrateful and degenerate party.
The puzzle lay in the limitation of the two territories being very hazy in Algeria. At length, after a month's running about, entanglements, and waiting under the sun in the yards of Arab Departmental offices, it was established that, whereas the lion had been killed on the military territory, on the other hand Tartarin was in the civil territory when he shot.
France made a failure of her American and Asiatic colonies as long as she cherished schemes of European aggrandizement. Her period of colonial expansion, Algeria apart, did not come until after the Franco-Prussian War and the death of her ambition for a Rhine frontier.
The custom of kindling bonfires on Midsummer Day or on Midsummer Eve is widely spread among the Mohammedan peoples of North Africa, particularly in Morocco and Algeria; it is common both to the Berbers and to many of the Arabs or Arabic-speaking tribes. The fires are lit in the courtyards, at cross-roads, in the fields, and sometimes on the threshing-floors.
The old people at Beaubocage survived the seigneur and chatelaine of Cotenoir by some years, and survived also the fiery lieutenant, who fell in Algeria without having attained his captaincy, or added any military renown to the good old name of de Nerague in his own magnificent person. Francois saw his grandson established at Cotenoir before he died.
There was Beau-Bruno, a dandy of Turcos, whose snowy turban and olive beauty bewitched half the women of Algeria; who himself affected to neglect his conquests, with a supreme contempt for those indulgences, but who would have been led out and shot rather than forego the personal adornings for which his adjutant and his capitaine du bureau growled unceasing wrath at him with every day that shone.
Heard some Souafah, Arabs of Souf, had purchased the slaves lately come from Bornou, to sell them in Algeria, there being no market in Tunis on account of the abolition of slavery. Rais sent for me and asked me if I had any money left. I thought his Excellency wanted to lend me some, by putting the question. His Excellency then said he was in want of money.
Colonel de Neven explained to me the importance of discrediting such a miracle by opposing to it a sleight-of-hand trick far superior to it, and I had the very article. I informed the Arabs that I possessed a talisman rendering me invulnerable, and I defied the best marksman in Algeria to hit me.
And yet it is right that such a tale should be told. A journey almost due South from near Algiers to Akassa in a ship that we should call no more than a yacht. Let it be a stimulus to younger men. Guarantee To The Reader Since writing down for your benefit, O my reader, all this long tale that I heard in the tavern by the sea I have travelled in Algeria and Tunisia as well as in the Desert.
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