St. Landry democrat., 1888-07-07
BELLIES OF MOROCCO.
An American Traveller Studies One Of
Them, and Is Studied by Her.

An American Traveller Studies One Of
Them, and Is Studied by Her.
The principal figure among the wash
ers was a comely young woman of per-
haps twenty, with bright intelli-
gent face and a form that could not be
criticised, and as she swung her 1.-the
body around | could not but fancy her
in pink silk tights and satin slippers.
Jacob selected this young person to ex-
ercise his Oriental imagination upon by
telling her tall yarns about my import
ance, and | soon found myself in for
more attention than man of retiring
taste would know what to do with. It
was all right when she felt of my
boots to see what they were made of,
and by a determined effort of the will |
kept quiet when she took my hat off
and ran her fingers through my hair;
for while, of course, did not like it at
all, at the same time was afraid of
decorating the feelings of this tender
daughter of the desert and submitted;
but when she found | had pockets and
commenced to go through them TO see
what they contained, felt the time had
come for me to tell her there was only
one woman in the world who had d
right to go through my pocket for
keeps, and so l tried to change the sub
ject. Then she pulled one of my gloves
off and put my hand on her arm to see
which was the whitest, and / asked
Jacob with a gasp if he did not think
the mules were loaded by this time;
but he was so busy sneezing Arabic at
the little brown-skinned maiden that he
paid no attention to me. Then my
companion ran over to Jacob and talked
the meanwhile with many gesticula-
tons, and Jacob interpreted that she
had small sister of fourteen whose
marriage price was certain weight of
silver equal to ten dollars, and if | could
afford so high a priced wife I could
have her.
I may say here that the marriage
price is always paid to the parents of
the bride at the wedding, and the
money is held in sacred trust for the
bride, as the laws of Morocco on the
divorce question are so free and gener-
Gus that all man has to do is to open
his door and put his wife out into the
street, in which case she goes back to
her parents and lives in dizzy luxury
on the income of s. or $40. The hor-
ror and Indignation with which | heard
this proposition l will leave my poor
innocent fellow man to imagine, but l
refrained from reading her a lecture on
the enormity of trying to inveigle an
innocent man into bigamy for fear she
would bring down her cousins and
aunts, and I should find myself the
possessor of ready-made harem be-
fore | had been week in the interior;
so / called Jacob and retreated in a
hurry, first giving her three empty
glass bottles, which seemed to be OF
tremendous value in her eyes, and an
empty tin can to a little girl who was
playing with a half dozen other little
savages as, naked as when they came
into the world. BY the way, their play
was the one bit of nature that makes
the whole world kin, for as watched
them it did not take long to see they
were making long rows OF mud pies
and putting them into little Moorish
oven of their own manufacture to bake,
onlv instead of the dear familiar night
mare creators of New England, they
took the shape of Moorish bread and
koos-koos, which last, to the Arab, is
what the holy bean is to Boston.-Cor.
Boston Transcript.