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The only army that he now has eyes for is the army of the odalisks and slave-girls, who seize their tambourines and mandolines, and weave the light dance around the happy imperial couple, singing sweet songs of enchantment, while outside through the streets of Stambul gun-carriages are rattling along, and the mob, in a frenzy of enthusiasm, clamours for a war of extermination against the invading Shiites.

Away out in the land that once was old Provence, we jested and sang the hours away, the women with their guitars and mandolines the men with their wild dances and tambourines, and love was the keynote of the music love! always love! Love in the sunshine! love under the moonbeams! bright eyes in which to drown one's soul, red lips on which to crush one's heart!

But they seldom reached the last verse of their song; at every sound they stopped short, threw down their triangles and their mandolines, and took flight like scared nightingales. One only had courage enough or passion enough to brave the mockery; this was Bastiano, the most formidable diver of that coast.

When he had finished his dinner the sun had set, and night had dropped down softly over the Bay. Capri had disappeared. The long serpent of lights had uncoiled itself along the sea. Down below, very far down, there was the twang and the thin, acute whine of guitars and mandolines, the throbbing cry of Southern voices. The stars were out in a deep sky of bloomy purple.

"A musical race," he will conclude, observing the number of decayed pianofortes, guitars, and mandolines. The climate of Messina, he will further arene, must have been a wet one, inasmuch as there are umbrellas everywhere, standing upright among the debris, leaning all forlorn against the ruins, or peering dismally from under them.

They danced the slow, trailing, lilting polka-waltz round and round the small room, the guitars and mandolines twanging rapidly, the dust rising from the soft bricks. There were only the two English women: so men danced with men, as the Italians love to do. They love even better to dance with men, with a dear blood-friend, than with women.

Occasionally the older people would pick up their instruments bagpipes of sheepskin, small drums and gourd-like mandolines and draw from them strange dronings, gurglings, thrummings, twangings; soon a group of youngsters would rise gravely from the ground and, without any preconcerted signal, begin to move in a dance a formal and intricate measure, such as had never yet been witnessed on Nepenthe.

The gramophone was playing the "March of the Gladiators"; the mandolines were tinkling anything and the mouth-organ had given it up entirely, merely punctuating the first beat of every bar with a thin concussion of the bell. Betty had sprinkled the floor with a slippery preparation she got from the store, called "ice-powder." "Be careful when you cross the floor.

As regards games and recreations, the prisoners are interested only in wrestling, cards and dominoes. They have been introduced to football without success. Some have shown great skill in the manufacture of mandolines, guitars, and tambourines. All materials as well as games are provided gratis by the British Government. The camp commandant has bought the men some gramophones.

Many of us must have resembled fully-equipped pedlars or super-caddis-worms carrying their houses on their backs, but in our case these were not composed of sticks or dead leaves, but provisions, gramophones, mandolines, pots, kettles, etc., tied together with string, the rattle of which appeared to amuse some of the civil population.