What Was Most Perfectly, Most Fittingly In Keeping Was The Sight Of The
Moors Whom We Began At Once To
See on the wharves and in the streets.
They probably looked very much like the Moors who followed their caliph,
If he was a caliph, into Spain when he drove Don Roderick out of his
kingdom and established his own race and religion in the Peninsula.
Moslem costumes can have changed very little in the last eleven or
twelve hundred years, and these handsome fellows, who had come over with
fresh eggs and vegetables and chickens and turkeys from Tangier, could
not have been handsomer when they bore scimitars and javelins instead of
coops and baskets. They had baggy drawers on, and brown cloaks, with
bare, red legs and yellow slippers; one, when he took his fez off, had a
head shaved perfectly bald, like the one-eyed Calender or the Barber's
brother out of the _Arabian Nights;_ the sparse mustache and
short-forked beard heightened the verisimilitude. Whether they squatted
on the wharf, or passed gravely through the street, or waited for custom
in their little market among the hen-coops and the herds of rather lean,
dispirited turkeys (which had not the satisfaction of their American
kindred in being fattened for the sacrifice, for in Europe all turkeys
are served lean), these Moors had an allure impossible to any Occidental
race. It was greater even than that of their Semitic brethren, who had a
market farther up in the town, and showed that a Jewish market could be
much filthier than a' Moorish market without being more picturesque.
Into the web of Oriental life were wrought the dapper figures of the
red-coated, red-cheeked English soldiers, with blue, blue eyes and
incredible red and yellow hair, lounging or hurrying orderlies with
swagger-sticks, and apparently aimless privates no doubt bent 'upon
quite definite business or pleasure.
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