Page:Algeria from Within.pdf/87

He repeated it again and again until he had got it quite fixed in his mind, and then left me, presumably to offer it to the lady. I did not see my friend again nor the lady, so I do not know how the courtship, based on my nine words, fared, but one day some years after this incident I was reading a novel, written also long after the little English lesson, by an author who could not have known of the incident; the scene was laid at Biskra; a fictitious agha was speaking:

. . . "I am learning English," he said gently; "tell me, please, if my pronunciation is correct." And in a curiously indefinable accent he proceeded to recite the little set piece that some one had mischievously taught him:

"Love me.

"Kiss me.

"Forgive me.

"Forget me." . . . ^[1]

The Arab mind had learned nothing more, but he had kept that sentence fixed in his brain to repeat when the opportunity presented itself!

They are all children, delightful children who never grow up.

Twelve hundred years ago they came to Algeria with their customs and their clothes and their sheep, and they are still in the same place with the same customs and the same clothes and the same breed of sheep. And, Inch Allah, they will be there in the same way when Jesus comes to judge the faithful.