land is concerned, in little hills that come nearly to the sea:
rudiments, these, of the Atlas Mountains. The missionary, having
had daily opportunities of looking at this seascape for thirty
years or so, pays no heed to it, being absorbed in trimming a
huge red geranium bush, to English eyes unnaturally big, which,
with a dusty smilax or two, is the sole product of his pet
flower-bed. He is sitting to his work on a Moorish stool. In the
middle of the garden there is a pleasant seat in the shade of a
tamarisk tree. The house is in the south west corner of the
garden, and the geranium bush in the north east corner.

At the garden-door of the house there appears presently a man who
is clearly no barbarian, being in fact a less agreeable product
peculiar to modern commercial civilization. His frame and flesh
are those of an ill-nourished lad of seventeen; but his age is
inscrutable: only the absence of any sign of grey in his mud
colored hair suggests that he is at all events probably under
forty, without prejudice to the possibility of his being under
twenty. A Londoner would recognize him at once as an extreme but
hardy specimen of the abortion produced by nature in a city slum.
His utterance, affectedly pumped and hearty, and naturally vulgar
and nasal, is ready and fluent: nature, a Board School education,
and some kerbstone practice having made him a bit of an orator.
His dialect, apart from its base nasal delivery, is not unlike
that of smart London society in its tendency to replace
diphthongs by vowels (sometimes rather prettily) and to shuffle
all the traditional vowel pronunciations. He pronounces ow as ah,
and i as aw, using the ordinary ow for o, i for a, a for u, and e
for a, with this reservation, that when any vowel is followed by
an r he signifies its presence, not by pronouncing the r, which