he may become a successful toreador, or snake-charmer, which things are out of our line!

The Snake-Charmer City of Morocco Fish found in Hot Springs Water-Snake

We were amused with the snake-charmers.

This is the true faith with respect to all serpents, and if you are resolved to remain steadfast in it, you may do so even in India, for it is possible to live in that country for months, I might almost say years, without ever getting a sight of a live snake except in the basket of a snake-charmer.

X THE INDIAN SNAKE-CHARMER

The tamasha which the snake-charmer promises the sahib will include serpent dances, a fight between a cobra and a mungoose, the inevitable mango tree, and other tricks of juggling.

But to a stranger the snake-charmer himself is a better tamasha than anything he can show.

What the snake-charmer is by race or origin ethnologists may determine when they have done with the gipsy.

But the snake-charmer is the best known and most widely spread of them all.

The connection between these performances and the man's second trade, namely, snake-charming, is not obvious to a Western mind; but it must be remembered that the snake-charmer is not a mere, vulgar juggler, amusing people with sleight-of-hand.

The snake-charmer keeps all sorts of them, but chiefly cobras.

Scientific men aver that a snake has no ears and cannot possibly hear the strains of the pipe, but that sort of science simply spoils a picturesque subject like the snake-charmer.

No missionary will find any difficulty in getting a snake-charmer to appreciate that Scripture text about the deaf adder which will not listen to the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely.

To these two occupations the snake-charmer adds that of a medicine man, for who should know the occult potencies of herbs and trees so well as he?

But the snake-charmer seems safe from that kind of competition.

So when Nagoo, the snake-charmer, heard that there was a large one in Beharilal's garden, he thought he might do good business by capturing it for the Jadoo-walla Saheb, and at the same time demanding a reward from the timorous Bunia for ridding him of such a dangerous neighbour.

Nagoo was a snake-charmer and by nature a gipsy, and this treatment rankled in his dark bosom.

"Go," cried Beharilal"go quickly and call Nagoo, the snake-charmer.

A snake-charmer exhibited his little society, which performed very clever tricks, and also allowed the most poisonous serpents to twine themselves round his body, and the largest scorpions ran over his arms and legs.

If the call were that of businessof any of the great perilous affairs he handled like a snake-charmer spinning the deadly reptiles about his headshe knew she would drop from his life like a loosened leaf.

Beyond these are the humbler crowds about the wild-ringleted snake-charmers with their epileptic gestures and hissing incantations, and farther off, in the densest circle of all, we could just discern the shaved heads and waving surpliced arms of the dancing-boys.

Among these are: "An Arab Café in the Slums of Cairo," much noticed in the Academy Exhibition of 1895; "Noon at Ramazan," "The Snake-Charmer," "Umbrellas to MendDamascus," and a group of the "Soudanese Friends of Gordon."

Some people go sailing on it for pleasure, and it has produced a breed of sailors who bear the same relation to the salt-water variety as a snake-charmer does to a lion-tamer.

At Hurdwar, in the great fair, among jugglers and tumblers, horse-tamers and snake-charmers, fakirs and pilgrims, I saw a small boy possessed of a devil,an authentic devil, as of yore, meet for miraculous driving-out.

Believe me, your gudgeon nibbled because I sang him to the surfacejust as the snakes come out for the song of the snake-charmer.