Fort Worth daily gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, 1890-04-05

vet adopted style. This will comprise a
reasonably modified Eliza bethan castle
or manse-house exterior, the Moresque-
Spanish interior, with free use of gal
lerv-supporting column and arch with
domed central roof, and that sweetest of
all provision for comfort and home
blessedness, the most liberal possible use
of the ample, glorious freplaces of
England, old and New.
One will see stranger things within
these streets than their quaint archi-
lecture. The shops are all merely tiny
inches in the walls The Moorish merchant
enters his black little den through
trap-door, lowers the shutter which
falls, often in steps, to the street, and
sits in the center of his possessions,
which are all within reach, voIceless and
grave the day long, like a forsaken
Punch in a pantomine. Every manner
of shop is just like his. In some,
workmen are embrOIdering the white
burnous, utilizing their great toes for
holding tight the disengaged thread. IN
others greasy fritters are fried in g
solemn and stately manner while one
waits. Some display ostrich eggs and
native ornaments. Here and there
is a seller of herbs and vegetables.
Again white-robed and bearded men
are surrounded by crates of charcoal and
tiny bundles of fagots. In others al
most priceless oriental draperies are
packed and punched around a merchant
who smokes and dreams as if no thought
of traffic ever entered his head. The
ancient and venerable letter and scroll
writer has his niche, or chair at archway
side, and waits with that stole patience
only an Indian or a Moslem can COM
I'll
passage from the Koran upon egg-shell,
or on ribbon for some devOut ones
amulet. Shoemakers squat cross-legged,
sewing and hammering upon sandals
and slippers only. Bread sellers
crouch against walls and doorways.
Groups of swarthy Kabyles with
their copper ewers are ever before the
gurgling old fountains. Yelled women
wriggle and mince to and from market
OF khouba. Stately Arabs appear and
disappear, their flowing robes shutting
out the vistas of the narrow streets.
Cloth vendors higgle-haggle at the
cracks of MASSIVE doors barely ajar.
Funeral oorteges pass on the Tun-for the
dead Moslem arrives in paradise that
much more speedily. Girls with dough-
covered boards ready for the bakeries
are as feet as the funerals. Tiny
donkeys loaded with street. garbage
force you against the walls. Other
donkeys with panniers packed with
fruits, orange blossoms and roses fill the
shadowy ways with the affairs Of sunny
Algerian valleys. The same weird, wild
scenes of semi barbara life that were
here thousand years ago are here to-
day, every day all day, and will re-
main. And if you wander these ghostlv
ways at night, all is still, shadowful,
silent. You see the white, silent walls
about you. Yon know that white, silent
forms whisk past you. And away up
there through infinite space you see the
white, silent stars looking down.
1t holds, fasoinates, enthralls. One is
bound with almost inseparable letters OF
interest to it; but when you have put the
sswhite dove on the hillside behind
you, something like breath of relief
comes, az it did to me yesterday, when 1
stepped foot upon Sicilian shores, even if
above the white walls and domes of
thrice RACED Catanis loom the dark and
forbidding outlines of hideous, fearful
and ever-destroying Rtna.
EDGAR l.. WAKEMAN.