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Occasionally ox-teams drawing heavily laden carts or wagons were seen along the smooth white roads; but more frequently appeared trains of slowly moving donkeys, five or six in a line, with gay trappings and bells and panniers piled high with produce, driven by red-sashed muleteers.

He no longer wore his chauffeur's livery, but was arrayed in a white linen robe, red-sashed, and wore loose, red slippers; a tarboosh perched upon his shaven skull. Pushing the door widely open, he entered with a tray upon which was spread a substantial breakfast. "Hurryup!" he muttered, as one word; wherewith he departed again.

"That'll be all on that line," said Red Bill presently. He turned to his companion. "Got a pencil and a bit of paper, Buck?" he asked. The red-sashed one produced the required pencil a much bitten stub and then set off toward the cook house for a bit of paper. He returned with the fly leaf out of an old account book. "Good enough," said Red Bill.

It was Rechid Bey, leaning comfortably back in an old-fashioned but not badly appointed open carriage, drawn by two very decent horses, and driven by a smart, red-sashed, white-robed negro. We saw him in profile as he passed along the road at some distance, but he was reading a paper with an expression so placid that I felt sure he had not seen us.

Boat after boat laden with priests and peasantry, with handsome red-sashed gallegos clad in brown, and ill-favoured women, came and got their permits, and were off, as we lay bumping up against the old hull of the Sanita boat; but the officers seemed to take a delight in keeping us there bumping, looked at us quite calmly over the ship's sides, and smoked their cigars without the least attention to the prayers which we shrieked out for release.

It was ten minutes after the last mouthful had disappeared that the tall, red-sashed young outlaw came toward the shack in front of which brother and sister were seated. "The boss wants to see you," he said briefly, and signed to them to follow him. Red Bill Summers sat alone before the remains of the Chinese cook's dinner.

In its cool dining room, decorated in the old Egyptian style with figures of gods and goddesses, with lotus blossoms and papyrus flowers, with hieroglyphics and symbols, painted on frieze, walls, and window sash, the tourists were waited on by white-robed, white-turbaned, red-sashed, red-slippered natives. The flies were a great pest.

There were red-sashed "Fisher Lads" wading with butterfly-nets on their shoulders; there was a "Tying the Ribbon on Pussy's Neck"; there were portraits in oil and petrifactions in crayon, as hard and tight as the purses of those who had refused to accept them, leaving them upon their maker's hands because the likeness had failed.

Once a summer a six-fathom canoe manned by a dozen paddles struggled down the waters of the broken Abitibi. Once a year a little band of red-sashed voyageurs forced their exhausted sledge-dogs across the ice from some unseen wilderness trail. That was all. Before her eyes the seasons changed, all grim, but one by the very pathos of brevity sad.

I had caught the infection, and as the red-sashed priest smilingly and playfully raised a threatening fat finger at me and said, "He is turned into a German, an Austrian," down came my fist upon the green cloth of the table. Philosophy, sang-froid, and political indifference were blown to the winds, carrying forethought and resolution with them.