The origin of marbles goes far back into antiquity, and the game is played to-day in lands which were old when Rome was built.

liquor to make them devilish without interfering with their fighting.

These famous black women warriors had a uniform of their own. They wore tips of horns on their heads and had sleeveless garments of blue and white cloth which fell to the knees. Under these were short trousers, which made it easy to distinguish them from the half-naked male warriors. In times of peace they also wore bells around. their necks as a warning to all men not in the army to keep out of their way. The other sex was afraid of them, too, and fled upon their approach, as it was death to be caught paying them special attentions. The women took vows of chastity upon entering the army, being, in fact, regarded somewhat as were the Vestal Virgins of old Rome. I have heard that many of these Amazons were beautiful, but if so they must have been far different from the African queens I saw during my audience with their former commander and king.

It is said that these women warriors were at their best during the last war which Behanzin waged with the French. During that struggle he caused a number of them to be beheaded on a charge of cowardice, and tried in every way to make them perfectly fearless and indifferent to pain. Among the most terrible trials of their courage was a climb up walls of cactus bushes sixteen feet high to a roof several hundred feet long carpeted with cactus. These barefooted and barelegged girls climbed the bristling walls and passed over the roof covered with cactus thorns. Then, as the story goes, they ran back and showed themselves to the king, their faces wreathed with smiles, although their feet and legs were covered with blood.

One of the French officers told me that the Amazons always planned to take their enemy by surprise, and that they made forced marches at night so as to fall upon them early in the morning. They would dash in upon their foes before they were fully awake, and then, with a terrible cry, would spring to the fray. This man said that he once saw four thousand of them grouped around King Behanzin, and that they were as muscular as the male warriors and quite as soldierly looking.

CHAPTER XV

THE OLDEST WHITE RACE OF THE WORLD

T

HE people of the Atlas Mountains are whites, with features like ours, and some of them have blue eyes and red hair. Many have rosy skins and complexions so fair that if dressed in European clothes they would not look strange in London, Paris, or New York. Others are darker, from their admixture with the Arabs and Moors, but they are still a distinct people and strong enough to impress their type on their offspring. This race is scattered through the mighty mountains of northwestern Africa. It is composed of the Berbers or Kabyles, who are numbered by millions and are found everywhere in these hills.

The Atlas Mountains begin opposite the Canary Islands, well down the Atlantic coast, and run from southwest to northeast for a distance of more than fifteen hundred miles, ending near Cape Bon, below the Island of Sicily. They are longer than from Philadelphia to Omaha and wider than the distance between Washington and New York. The region is more than one seventh the size of the United States proper, and, including the valleys, has a population of fifteen millions or more.

Fully one half of these people are made up of the descendants of this white race, and if we add the tribes which have left the mountains and gone down into the lowlands and desert, the Kabyles will number still more. The

Tuaregs, the fierce brigands of the Sahara, who wear veils night and day and scour the desert on camels and rob the caravans, are of Berber origin, and so are the Biskris and others who come from far down in the Sahara to do the heavy work about the wharves of the Algerian ports. There are several million Berbers in Morocco, where they have divided up into hundreds of tribes. They live in the mountains and are lawless and wild. The band of Raisuli, which kidnapped Ion Perdicaris, was one of these tribes.

The Berbers are the oldest white race upon record, and if we could trace our own forefathers back to the Stone Age we should probably find that they are our cousins. They are supposed to have come here from southern Europe, but if so, it was when Europe was savage and when our ancestors were still eating with their fingers and sleeping on skins in the wilds of the forests.

Indeed, the Berbers were here when Athens was in its infancy and when Rome was yet to be born. There are records in the Egyptian temples dating as far back as thirteen hundred years before Christ, which speak of them as having rosy cheeks, blue eyes, and red hair, and we find them fighting with the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Goths, and the Vandals. They were conquered again and again, but they fled to their fastness in the Atlas and have kept their individuality to this day.

When the Arabs came, the Berbers were once more overcome. They adopted the Mohammedan religion but modified it to suit themselves, and they have still their own ways and customs, as they had in the past. The Kabyle women do not veil their faces, and a man is satisfied to have but one wife. A large number, however, have intermarried with the alien races, so that there are now