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Up in the front bedroom of her charming home in the Avenue Henri Martin is a table covered with boxes filled with glass beads of every color. Here Madame Balli, with a group of friends, sits during all her spare hours and begins the necklaces which the soldiers come for and take back to the hospital to finish.

Looking at the portrait of Callot in which he appears at the height of his brief career with well formed, gracious features, ardent eyes, a bearing marked by serenity and distinction, an expression both grave and genial, the observer inevitably must ask: "Is this the creator of that grotesque manner of drawing which for nearly three centuries has borne his name, the artist of the Balli, the Gobbi, the Beggars?"

Here lion lie in wait for them occasionally, and it is a frequent subject of discussion among naturalists and sportsmen how such heavy, thirsty animals can subsist in the Haud. The most probable supposition is that they only enter this region with the rains and trek from one balli to another. I have met a lioness a long way out of lion country presumably trekking from one water-hole to the next.

The soldiers in many of the hospitals are doing flat beadwork, which is ingenious and pretty; but nothing compares with these necklaces of Madame Balli, and some of the best dressed American women in Paris are wearing them.

Every country, no doubt, has its putrescent spots caused by premature senility, but no country so far has shown itself as wholly crumbling in an age where the world is still young. A few days later I went with Madame Balli and Mr. Holman-Black to the military hospital, Chaptal, devoted to the men whose faces had been mutilated.

A galang, or ring of brass wire, represents about the value of a dollar. But for small payments salt is the most in use. A measure called a salup, weighing about two pounds, is equal to a fanam or twopence-halfpenny: a balli, another small measure, goes for four keppeng, or three-fifths of a penny.

Mexico: at the shop of Geronymo Balli in the year 1609; printed by Cornelio Adriano Cesar. Source: The translation is made from the Harvard copy of the original printed work. TRANSLATION: This is made by Alfonso de Salvio, Norman F. Hall, and James Alexander Robertson.

The first room was an immense apartment with an open space beyond the beds filled to-day with men who crowded about Madame Balli, as much to get that personal word and smile from her, which the French soldier so pathetically places above all gifts, as to have the first choice of a pipe or knife.

A Mexican boy came running to care for her horse, a Mexican woman greeted her as she entered the wide, cool hall and went to her room. Alaire had ridden far. Part of the night had been spent at the Balli goat-ranch, the remainder of the journey had been hot and dusty, and even yet she was not wholly recovered from her experience of the outward trip.

The change from the "balli sahib" of the Tabbas villagers to the "O, O, O" of the Afghan nomads is novel and entertaining in the extreme, and I sit and listen with no small interest to the edifying conversation of the khan, the mirza, and the mudbake on the one side, and the Eimuck chieftain and prominent members of the tribe on the other.