But the greatest sensation of all is when the camels come. Whole
strings of real camels, better even than in the procession of Blue
Beard, with soft rolling eyes and bended necks, swaying from one
side of the bazaar to the other to and fro, and treading gingerly
with their great feet. O you fairy dreams of boyhood! O you sweet
meditations of half-holidays, here you are realised for half-an-
hour! The genius which presides over youth led us to do a good
action that day. There was a man sitting in an open room,
ornamented with fine long-tailed sentences of the Koran: some in
red, some in blue; some written diagonally over the paper; some so
shaped as to represent ships, dragons, or mysterious animals. The
man squatted on a carpet in the middle of this room, with folded
arms, waggling his head to and fro, swaying about, and singing
through his nose choice phrases from the sacred work. But from the
room above came a clear noise of many little shouting voices, much
more musical than that of Naso in the matted parlour, and the guide
told us it was a school, so we went upstairs to look.

I declare, on my conscience, the master was in the act of
bastinadoing a little mulatto boy; his feet were in a bar, and the
brute was laying on with a cane; so we witnessed the howling of the
poor boy, and the confusion of the brute who was administering the
correction. The other children were made to shout, I believe, to
drown the noise of their little comrade's howling; but the
punishment was instantly discontinued as our hats came up over the
stair-trap, and the boy cast loose, and the bamboo huddled into a
corner, and the schoolmaster stood before us abashed. All the
small scholars in red caps, and the little girls in gaudy
handkerchiefs, turned their big wondering dark eyes towards us; and
the caning was over for THAT time, let us trust. I don't envy some