countryman's low spirits might be due to an attack of nerves.
Thus puzzling, the absent-minded pedestrian wandered on among strange, narrow streets, and presently found them so queer that they offered him a new puzzle to solve. The people about him were swarthy, but not brown; they wore gaudy stripes upon their robes; the men were hawk-nosed and black-bearded, and the women he saw were not veiled. What puzzled him was the fact that the faces seemed familiar to him, and so did the garments; he had that disturbing sense, like an elusive half-recollection, of having been in this place and among these people long, long before, in his childhood or in a previous incarnation. For a time the solution evaded him; then all at once he understood, and laughed to himself. This was the Jewish quarter; these Jews of North Africa were just what they had been two thousand years ago; they wore the same dress and lived as they had immemorially lived. Time had no meaning here; and he had casually stepped back into the Bible. The scenes about him were from the Old Testament; and that was why he felt he had been among them before; they were like the coloured illustrations in an elaborate "Children's
