Fort Worth Daily Gazette

A letter in the San Francisco Chronicle says: The Arab women, scrupulously veiled when in the more crowded thoroughfares, are much in public. Sometimes the drapery drawn about the face parts a little, if the wearer is pretty and knows it, which is rarely the case-that is, the beauty and not the consciousness of the fact. It may be taken as a rule in all Mohammedan countries that the more earnestly a woman tries to conceal her face the more hideous her ugliness, for it often happens in Cairo and sometimes in Algiers that the accidental falling of the veil reveals the unsightly lineaments of a negress from the Soudan. Most of the Arab women of Algiers trip along the streets seemingly unconscious of observation, carrying their little effects tied up in a handkerchief, now and then stopping to inspect the shop windows or to purchase a pretzel of a street vender, for the Germans have imposed their beer with their indigestible concomitants on the French colonies, and not always to their advantage. Now and then one by the intentness of her look through the parted drapery suggests a difference of social strata, or at least a disposition to a little harmless flirtation. The blending of French and Algerian vice is not such as to delight the moralist. There are Moorish and Arab cocottes who drop the veil and assume the garb and coquettish manners of their Parisian sisters, and prove themselves no mean rivals either in personal charms or the blandishments that make vice attractive. These are, however, exceptional, for the life of the Arab has not been such as to refine his features, which are hereditarily hard and strongly marked into many of the types which modern civilization recognizes as beautiful.