always been a noted smugglers' hunting ground. From Europe to Africa, from country to country along the shores, among the innumerable islands, -Corsica, Minorca, Crete, Sicily, Sardinia, the Grecian Archipelago, Malta and scores of others,— smuggling has, since history began, been a regular occupation of the people. Cooper's famous and fascinating story, "Wing and Wing," was founded on smugglers and the romantic and delightful hero of the tale was a smuggler. Corsica has always been noted for its smugglers, as have the Balearic Islands and the isles of the Aegean Sea, and a very desperate and piratical lot these Mediterranean smugglers were and are. Their swift, latteensailed feluccas and their picturesque garb give them that smuggler-of-fiction touch that is the delight of artists and romancers. But if truth must be told, they are, taken all in all, a pretty sordid, ordinary, dirty and unsavory crowd, mostly fisherfolk who combine their honest but unremunerative vocation with the more lucrative if dishonest one.

And while they may no longer be pirates out and out, they are quite as ready and willing to rob the wayfarer or the unfortunate as to rob the governments to which they ostensibly owe allegiance. They are, or many are, more than suspected of being wreckers, and even if they do not perhaps carry on this despicable profession to the extent of their ancestors,-who lured ships upon rocks

deliberately—yet they consider stranded vessels as their rightful prey,-flotsam and jetsom treasure-trove so to speak,-and unhesitatingly strip the craft and the dead and living members of their crews of everything of value. But even nearer home than the Mediterranean we have men of the same ilk. In the Bahamas, until quite recently, the natives purposely wrecked ships, and on many an outlying cay they still loot wrecked vessels and shipwrecked seamen without compunction. And like their Mediterranean fellows, the Bahamans are born smugglers.

But to return to the Orient and Oriental smugglers. Although the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Red Sea and the Caspian are all ideal localities for the smuggling fraternity, yet the arid deserts of the East are perhaps even better adapted to their activities.

Inhabited by nomadic tribes, far from the reach of the law, even where law is little better than a name, with often times several countries abutting the wastes and with no very definite boundaries, the deserts offer opportunities for running contraband that are almost free from danger. And the caravans of horses, mules and camels provide the means of transportation. Perfumes, musk, spices, jewels, drugs, silks, carpets and rugs; laces and metal ware; ivories and slaves are loaded upon the lumbering beasts and carried long leagues

across the trackless sands to eventually find a market in many a bazaar of Cairo, Alexandria, Tunis, Constantinople or other Oriental ports. Probably not one in a thousand of the true Oriental rugs, silks and other products of the East that find their way to our shores ever paid the taxes provided by law before they entered our ports,—and often not even then. But how many of us ever stop to think of their wanderings, to ponder on the strange sights, the scenes through which they have passed; to realize the romance, the adventures, the dangers that have surrounded them, or to visualize, to reconstruct their history? Perchance it is a softtoned Persian rug, a thing of no great value, no priceless so-called antique, and we may marvel a bit that it could have been woven, transported thousands of miles, passed through the hands of exporters and importers and wholesale and retail dealers with duties paid and yet sell so cheaply. But if we knew its story we would wonder still more and would find the rectangle of pastel-colored wool a far more interesting object than we ever dreamed.

Entangled in its fringe is a tiny shred of golden thread; it exhales a faint, indescribable, intangible odor that we call "Oriental;" and on one corner is a dark, dull stain, scarcely visible against the pattern of Indian red. Little things, matters that would pass unnoticed and would be utterly elim

inated at its first trip to the cleaners', but which, if we knew their history, mean much. Let us close our eyes and try to picture the scenes of our rug's wanderings. A tiny mud hut in a Persian valley amid the foothills of the towering mountains, a hut squalid, smoke-grimed, bare of all furnishings save earthen pots, piles of goat and sheep skins, a rude bench and a ruder stool; windowless and dim. Before its open door play dark-skinned, black-eyed naked children; a few scrawny fowls, black-haired, long-horned goats and some flea-bitten curs. A man, fierce whiskered, swarthy, clad in rough garments of wool, a sheep skin fez upon his greasy hair, his broad leathern belt bristling with curved daggers, a yatghan and an ancient pistol with stock of inlaid ivory, stands, resting on a long-barrelled, flint-lock gun, bargaining with a stranger before the hut. Within, a hawk-faced, snuff-colored woman is removing her handiwork of weary weeks from its rude loom, a woolen rug of dull hues made yet duller by the grime of smoke, the dust and the contact of dirty hands as, day after day, week after week, it had grown slowly, gradually from the first few strands of warp and knotted woof to the completed bit of carpet. Slinkingly, cringingly, she carries it from the hut, and with half a dozen like it, lays the rug before the stranger, the itinerant buyer. A tall lean man is he, cunning-faced, thick-lipped, shifty-eyed with

a tangled, straggling forked beard and snaky locks; a badly tied, filthy turban on his head; stained and discolored garments of camel's hair upon his body. A crafty rascal who spreads his hands and shrugs his shoulders and vows by Allah and the Prophet that he is poor beyond words, that the market for rugs is at lowest ebb, that the ones before him are miserable things, and that between high duties, the danger of robbers in the hills and the long journey to the ports he will be out of pocket if he pays one fourth the price the fierce-faced Persian mountaineer demands. But at length the deal is made; a few, a pitifully few, thin coins pass from his clawlike hands to the clutching brown palms of the mountaineer, and tying the bundle of rugs to his pack-horse, the Arab goes on his rounds.

A train of laden mules, of mounted men on highsaddled horses, of swaying, rolling camels, threading their way through a narrow defile among the hills. High the beasts are piled with bales and bundles, with swaying canopied palanquins. The black-haired, swarthy, mounted men carry cocked and ready rifles with pistols loosened in belts, and peer furtively, keenly, into each dim shadow and among the tumbled piles of red and yellow rock

that strew the way. Upon the leading camel, amid scores of others, is the rug from the far off hut in the Persian foothills. With it upon the ungainly beast's back are bales of other goods-strings of