Every Saturday night in winter there is a masked ball at the Grand
Theatre of Algiers, just as at the Paris Opera-House. It is the
undying and ever-tasteless county fancy dress ball -- very few
people on the floor, several castaways from the Parisian students'
ballrooms or midnight dance-houses, Joans of Arc following the
army, faded characters out of the Java costume-book of 1840, and
half-a-dozen laundress's underlings who are aiming to make loftier
conquests, but still preserve a faint perfume of their former life --
garlic and saffron sauce. The real spectacle is not there, but in the
green-room, transformed for the nonce into a hall of green cloth or
gaming saloon.

An enfevered and motley mob hustle one another around the long
green table-covers: Turcos out for the day and staking their double
halfpence, Moorish traders from the native town, Negroes, Maltese,
colonists from the inland, who have come forty leagues in order to
risk on a turning card the price of a plough or of a yoke of oxen; all
a-quivering, pale, clenching their teeth, and with that singular,
wavering, sidelong look of the gamester, become a squint from
always staring at the same card in the lay-out.

A little apart are the tribes of Algerian Jews, playing among
acquaintances. The men are in the Oriental costume; hideously
varied with blue stockings and velvet caps. The puffy and flabby
women sit up stiffly in tight golden bodices. Grouped around the
tables, the whole tribe wail, squeal, combine, reckon on the fingers,
and play but little. Now and anon, however, after long conferences,
some old patriarch, with a beard like those of saints by the Old
Masters, detaches himself from the party and goes to risk the family