310 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



GOURDS AND BOTTLES. 



By GKANT ALLEN. 



Ql TROLLING, this afternoon, down the street El-Akhdar, 

 ^ where silent Arab women, muffled up to the eyes, gliding 

 noiselessly past, disappeared at my approach, to right and left, 

 down darkling doorways in the narrow alley, I chanced to pass 

 the Moorish shop of my friend the Hadji Omar-ben-Marabet, who, 

 removing his pipe gravely from his mouth for a moment, beck- 

 oned me in with his hand to the court-yard of his house to bespeak 

 my favorable inspection of his new stock of rustic, hand-made 

 Kabyle pottery. I followed him through the corridor to the open 

 oust, or central hall, and proceeded to look over his latest im- 

 portations. The Hadji's wares were indeed pretty and curious 

 enough, manufactured in quaint traditional shapes from the 

 coarse yellow clay of the country by the deft-fingered women of 

 the Djurjura Mountains. Two among them took my fancy espe- 

 cially. One was a flattened circular vase or bottle, with a short 

 neck, and two handles at the side, covered with a pretty running 

 arabesque pattern of the kind so common on the Morocco earthen- 

 ware. The other was a quaint little red gourd-shaped vessel, 

 with two bulges, constricted in the middle, exactly like the ordi- 

 nary shepherd's gourd that one sees so often hanging from a 

 countryman's girdle on the Roman Campagna or the Provengal 

 hill-sides. After the usual chaffering and higgling of the market, 

 conducted on both sides with unabated ardor for several minutes, 

 my good friend Hadji Omar consented at last to accept for the 

 pair — from me only, he called Allah to witness, as a particular 

 customer — one third of the price he had at first demanded ; and I 

 walked off in triumph, at the end of our debate, Avith my two jars 

 slung proudly in my hand, and my purse lighter by probably not 

 much more than double the real value of my two little purchases. 

 Now, at the wine-shop next door, where a Barbary Jew, in dark- 

 blue turban, jacket, and sash, administers drink, in spite of the 

 Prophet's veto, to thirsty humanity, all and sundry, be it Chris- 

 tian or Moslem, there hung at the lintel a whole string of gourds 

 — the natural fruit, look you, not any spurious fictile imitation — 

 which interested me strangely, because they happened to belong 

 to two separate varieties, the originals and models, as chance 

 would have it, of my two curious Kabyle vases. Struck by the 

 resemblance, I bought one of each, to complete my little illustra- 

 tive museum of native pottery ; and I have them now set up in 

 the horseshoe arch by the window before my eyes as I write, a 

 perpetual reminder of the true origin of all the bottles known 



