A Desert Caravan

A great caravan in march is a supero spectaole, alas! too infrequent now in northern África. At first Arabs alone can detect it, a mere speek lost in a dusty halo, whence it emerges at length, a tawny colored mass possessed of a strange motion, the swarming of a thonsand lives in one. Here and there silhouettes of straggling camels stand profiled, like hieroglyphics, on the fiery sky, as, insensdbly traüing its snakelike curves, the convoy advances. Hours after being sighted it passes in slow defile, led by a vanguard of blooded camels, whose gait and bearing have an air of arrogance not customary to that race of proletarians, the chieftains seated aloft in their floating burnooses, alert of eye, with gun in hand, statuesque guardians of the convoy treasure. . Behind themthe camels of burden, exhausted less by loads than with the fatigues of the journey, their legsand croppersbald and scarred by blows, straggle forward languidly, thrusting out the tongue as they press their huge, spongy f eet in the yielding ground. What resignation in their soft, staring eyes! Verily, no philosopher knows better than these poor brutes how mane are the revolts against inexorable fate. Near at hnd walk the drivers, their emaciated features savagely illumined by eyes of Sre, and white, gleaming teeth piercing their parched lips. Of all who started with the caravan, how many have fallen by the way, abandoned to onize alone m the