a rocking to and fro, which occasionally enables them to keep time. A
sharp application of the switch is wonderfully effectual in re-calling
wandering attention. Lazy boys are speedily expelled.

On the admission of a pupil the parents pay some small sum,
varying according to their means, and every Wednesday, which is a
half-holiday, a payment is made from a farthing to twopence. New
moons and feasts are made occasions for larger payments, and count
as holidays, which last ten days on the occasion of the greater
festivals. Thursday is a whole holiday, and no work is done on Friday
morning, that being the Mohammedan Sabbath, or at least "meeting day,"
as it is called.

At each successive stage of the scholastic career the schoolmaster
parades the pupils one by one, if at all well-to-do, in the style
already alluded to, collecting gifts from the grateful parents to
supplement the few coppers the boys bring to school week by week. If
they intend to become notaries or judges, they go on to study at Fez,
where they purchase the key of a room at one of the colleges, and read
to little purpose for several years. In everything the Korán is the
standard work. The chapters therein being arranged without any idea
of sequence, only according to length,--with the exception of the
Fátihah,--the longest at the beginning and the shortest at the end,
after the first the last is learned, and so backwards to the second.

Most of the lads are expected to do something to earn their bread at
quite an early age, in one way or another, even if not called on to
assist their parents in something which requires an old head on young
shoulders. Such youths being so early independent, at least in a
measure, mix with older lads, who soon teach them all the vices they