LIONS of the Atlas, sleep! -- sleep tranquilly at the back of your
lairs amid the aloes and cacti. For a few days to come, any way,
Tartarin of Tarascon will not massacre you. For the time being, all
his warlike paraphernalia, gun-cases, medicine chest, alimentary
preserves, dwelt peacefully under cover in a corner of room 36 in
the Hotel de l'Europe.

Sleep with no fear, great red lions, the Tarasconian is engaged in
looking up that Moorish charmer. Since the adventure in the
omnibus, the unfortunate swain perpetually fancied he felt the
fidgeting of that pretty red mouse upon his huge backwoods
trapper's foot; and the sea-breeze fanning his lips was ever scented,
do what he would, with a love-exciting odour of sweet cakes and
patchouli.

He hungered for his indispensable light of the harem! and he meant
to behold her anew.

But it was no joke of a task. To find one certain person in a city of
a hundred thousand souls, only known by the eyes, breath, and
slipper, -- none but a son of Tarascon, panoplied by love, would be
capable of attempting such an adventure.

The plague is that, under their broad white mufflers, all the Moorish
women resemble one another; besides, they do not go about much,
and to see them, a man has to climb up into the native or upper
town, the city of the "Turks," and that is a regular cut-throat's den.

Little black alleys, very narrow, climbing perpendicularly up