Old Junk

d, what is better, do not care. This is December and this is Algiers, and I am tired of white glare and dust. The trees have slept all day. They have hardly turned a leaf.

not know where Celestine will take me. I do not care where I g

away in the folds of the North African hills where they come down to the sea between Algiers and Carthage. They will reveal themselves as I find my w

ers. And again, Celestine is French, and so we can do little more than smile at each other to make visible the friendship of our two great nations. A cable

t us as though the wind really had got the sky loose. The Celestine is turning her head for t

that it could not account altogether for his vivacity and sudden open friendship for a shy alien. He wanted me to elope with Celestine. He wanted to show me his African shore, to see his true Mediterranean. I had travelled from Morocco to Algiers, and was tired of tourist trains, historic ruins, hotels, Arabs selling p

n betrayal and descent; and does it again, and again. Africa has vanished. Where Algiers probably was there are

master is not a sailor, then all the signs are wrong. He looks at me roguishly. Ah! His shi

ssingly playful--but I shall show him presently, with fair luck, that my inelastic Saxon putty can transmute itself, can also volatilise in abandonment to sparkling nonsense; yet not tonight--not tonight, monsieur. He is so gay and friendly to me whenever he sees me. But when one of the staff does that which is not down in th

has the wrong pantomime for the ship's beef, unless French horses have the same music as English cows. After the first dinner, I was indiscreet enough to refuse the cognac with the coffee. "Ah!" he chided, smiling with craft, and

n. (My God!) "Aha!" said the reader of my hidden desire, pouring out the tipple for which he imagines I am perishing in stoic British silence. "Viskee!" I drain off, with simulated delight, my larg

nglish all the way to Cochin-China. He writes in his notebook, very slowly, while his tongue comes out to look on, a sentence like this: "The nombres Fran?aise, they are most easy that the English language." Then I put him right; and