though I witnessed none of these myself that were at all wonderful. But the solemnity of the countenances of the performers, and the appearance of earnestness in their work, while it had something ludicrous in it, I yet found impressive and affecting. May it not be, I thought, that even in this there are the first rudiments of the expression of an unknown need? an inward prayer, that is yet so undefined as to take no embodiment in articulate sound, but utters itself in howls and artificial noises? These too are the children of the one Father, and there may be even in these orgies something of prayer that reaches the ear that listens not for the form of the words, but the utterance of the need. And I could not help collating these barbarities with some forms of Christian worship, good enough in themselves, but which when exalted into the place of essential duty, seemed to me equally senseless with these half animal utterances, and far more provoking, as being forced on the attention by persons whose appearance and development in other things seem to justify the expectation of something much farther beyond their negro brothers and sisters. At these exhibitions many Moorish women are present, but they take no other share in the performances than receiving every now and then what seems a benediction, in the form of being twisted by the shoulders from one side to the other and back, accompanied by other manipulations from the negresses; and inhaling now and then the odours of the fumigations proceeding from an earthen sherd with live charcoal, on which incense is sprinkled, and held under their faces.

Very different in purport and effect is the worship of the Mohammedans, to whom, however, the negroes belong, at least in name, although the remnants of old superstitions yet retain a power over them. One fine moonlight night, during the fast of Ramadan, my wife and I set out to walk to the town, that we might see the principal mosque lighted up for worship. Such good order is preserved under the rule of the French, and such is the quiet behaviour of the inhabitants generally, that we were far safer in doing so than we should have been in the neighbourhood of any large town in our own country. The streets were beginning to be deserted as we went through. After passing along a blank wall, within a colonnade in one of the principal streets, for some distance, a gloomy looking door in it, on being pushed open, admitted us into a kind of piazza, which ran round three sides of an open court. In this passage a fountain stood for the frequent washing enjoined by their law. The fourth side of the quadrangle was formed by the open arches of the roofed part of the mosque, which inner part seemed a much larger quadrangle than the outer, and was all divided into small square portions, by lines of pillars and arches, intersecting each other at right angles. The arches running in one direction were all plain, those crossing them ornamented by having the under side cut into many little arches. Along every avenue of pillars, running from the entrance inwards, was suspended a row of oil lamps, consisting of glass basins with floating wicks. These rows, when approaching the opposite wall, began to ascend, and the

lamps were carried gradually up the wall a short way, so as to give the appearance of a long perspective of lights. There were very few worshippers present, and these scattered in little groups throughout the building, but mostly at the upper end, where we heard the low tones of the priest's voice, in listening to which the worshippers now stood, now kneeled, and now bowed low with their foreheads to the ground. Once or twice a Moor, who seemed to have some charge in the observances, waved us away with dignity when he saw us; but we moved to a different part of the building, and had no other interruption to our curiosity. But the most picturesque point of view was the exterior court. Here, the moon shone clear into the court, her light falling upon a large tree in the centre, around which clung the stem of a great vine. As we looked up we saw one of the towers of the mosque rising high above us into the night, with the faint glitter of the moonlight on the glazed tiles which ornamented it near the top, around which was disposed a coronal of dull lamps, like those in the mosque below, and which showed reddish in the pale moonshine. Then on the other side opened the wide, strong arches, with the long rows of lamps stretching far into the distance of the mosque.

Stormy as the season was, the common red geranium had been in blossom in the hedges all the winter through. We had never been quite without flowers; but now, as the spring came on, the new children of the year began to arrive. I am no botanist, and my knowledge of the flowers is like my knowledge of the human kind. I have a few friends, a good many acquaintances of some of whom I should be glad to be rid—and a vast multitude pass before my eyes whom I have not yet learned to like or dislike. Now, sometimes I come gradually to know and value a flower for what it is; sometimes I love one for the sake of its friends; sometimes I fall in love with one all at once for itself, with a love that never leaves me. It was a mingling of the latter two of these loves that arose in me when I saw first the

splendid blue pimpernel of this country. I had been intimately acquainted with its red cousin in England; and that feeling blended with the new love for the blue one. It grows to a great size on the sides of the hills facing the sea; that is, the largest are as large as a small primrose. They grow in great multitudes, and are of a deep, burning blue, as an artist friend styled it. A slender, snaky, curled grass, that crept along the ground on the tops of the cliffs above the sea, and moved me with some feeling of repugnance, came out in the spring a delicate little blue iris. Indeed, the iris is a common flower here in all colours. A kind of asphodel is common in the fields; and the marigolds and lupins are likewise in great quantities. The varieties of grasses are very strange and beautiful. The cactus flowers had only just begun to appear before we left; but the acacia blossoms were wondrously rich and lovely, and filled the air around our dwelling with their odours. For ten acacia-trees stood on a terrace by our door; and pleasant it was, with the brilliant moon overhead, leaning down towards the earth, to walk on this terrace, looking

out over the Mediterranean, and hearing the low talk of the sea and the shore, each a mystery to the other, sounding on far below.

When the warmer weather arrived, I ventured inland as far as the town of Medéah, which lies high among the mountains. Two ladies and myself formed the party; and, seated in the banquette of the diligence, travelled with much enjoyment, first through the plain of the Metidja to Blidah, and next through the gorge of the Chiffah to Medeah. The day after our arrival in Blidah we strolled out through the town, and soon found ourselves in the market-place. Here one of my companions seated herself on a sack of corn, and commenced sketching some of the Arabs present. We left her surrounded by a group of twenty or thirty Arabs, one of whom, grinning with amusement, was half-leaning, half-lying, over another full sack, and presenting his handsome face for the exercise of her skill. In submitting without repugnance to this operation, these Arabs differed very much from those in Algiers, who would rarely, from religious scruples, (representations of the human form being condemned by their prophet) allow their portraits to be taken. Indeed, the same lady had, on one occasion at least, caused the sudden dispersion of a group assembled round a café, by proceeding to sketch it from the opposite side of the street. They hurried on their shoes, rose from their varied postures, and escaped as from an evil eye. Here the men appeared more free, but the women, in one particular at least, less so. For, whereas in Algiers all the Moorish women show both eyes, in the interior the Arab women gather the haik around the whole face except one eye, which you cannot see from the accumulated shade around it. You are hereby delivered, at least, from the sad expression of eyes which, whether from the effect of the setting of white, or from the mystery of concealment, appear invariably beautiful. These eyes are always dark; for, although I have seen blue eyes, on more than one occasion, shining out from these veiled faces, I was assured they must belong to women of Turkish, and not Arab descent. How strange some of our fair Saxon women would look in the streets of Algiers! for the French women are generally dark too. But the dress of the country women is very inferior, of course, to that of those living in the towns. Though when in the street the latter are dressed entirely in white, you can see through their thin upper garments the shining of their gold and blue or red girdles; and the garments are so white that they look ghostly. If you were to see one at the end of a deep narrow passage, emerging from a yet deeper gloom behind, especially if at night, and in the moonshine, you would think of a wandering ghost, or the raising of the sheeted dead. But in the country they seem to dress in the same kind of woollen stuff that the men wear. To return, however, to the morning in question. My other companion and I went outside one of the gates of the town, and seated ourselves on the grass. She commenced sketching, and I began to write a note. A little group soon gathered round us, of which two or three were native soldiers in the French army. With one of these, a fine-looking young fellow, who had been in the Crimea, I soon made friends, by asking him to give me a cigarette;

the most common way of smoking tobacco here, out of doors, being to twist up a little in paper prepared for the purpose. He granted my petition with the greatest alacrity; and, having prepared the cigarette, proceeded, by inserting a corner of his handkerchief, which had no hem on it, in one of his percussion caps, and scratching the powder at the bottom with the picker of his musket, to get me a light. He asserted the brotherhood of the English and the Africans, by laying his two forefingers together, and saying in French that they were all the same. I managed to have a little talk with him in French; after which we exchanged two small coins in memoriam, and he presented me with a Turkish one in addition. He then left me, but soon returned, bringing a beautiful bunch of roses, dripping with water, which he gave me. Something within me said, and says yet, we shall meet again.

When we rejoined our companion, whom we left in the market, she told us that after she had finished her sketching, and was going away, one of the Arabs ran after her, and offered her three sous. She asked one who understood French what he meant by it. He said it was to get a cup of coffee with. Their own women have no money, and he had supposed the English women have none either, and wished to show her this hospitality.

The gorge of the Chiffah is threaded by a fine road, one of the many the French have made in Algeria, running along the sides of the mountains, often at a considerable height above the bed of the river. Along the most difficult part of this road, with no parapet on the precipitous descent, and with very abrupt turns, we were driven by a heavy-browed, sullen-faced Moor, the only Moor I remember to have seen driving. To his muscular arm the seven horses he had in hand seemed no more than his four to one of our English coachmen. This part of the journey was very fine; especially one portion, which was crowded on both sides of the ravine with waterfalls of every kind. One of these was very peculiar. It appeared to come right out of the face of the precipice, and after running a little way down, again disappeared, as if it had run back into the rock from which it had sprung. Lovely ferns grew on the sides of the rocks, constantly splashed, and dripping with the clear water that ran from above. Though I dislike minute descriptions of scenery, and desire, with Jean Paul, that my friend should have the power of seeing Nature in large masses, yet sometimes the most intense enjoyment flows from no more than a cubic foot of the earth's bulk. I remember one little insignificant hollow, built of rough stones, and roofed over with a stone, inside which tumbled and gurgled and murmured and glided (I wish I might use the preterite, glode) adown the three feet of its height, a plenteous little cataract of clear, willing water; and all the sides of the tiny cavern were draped and purfled and waved with the maidenhair fern, with its black stalks and trembling leaflets. But no descriptive arrangement of scenery is of much use. A single unexpected flash of words may now and then throw a real feeling of the scenery on the mind; but the imagination generally outrunning the intellectual

reception of a description, arranges at its will the component elements of the scene, which afterwards refuse to be displaced, even when the mind is better informed. Indeed, a composition painted to express the general feeling produced in the artist's mind by any landscape, may do more to give a real impression of the nature of a country, in its relation to the higher elements of our being, than the most laborious portrait of real scenes in it, indispensable as these are to a perfect understanding of the whole; because the state of minute observation, the tension of the mind in attending, is inimical to those influences of the whole, which need for their perfection a lake-like calmness and passiveness of the spirit.

It seemed to me noticeable that, both on my companions and myself, the hot south wind from the desert, which prevailed during our short stay at Medéah, produced effects similar to those occasioned by a cold east wind at home.

At length the time came for our return to green grass, and large trees, and grey skies, and the increasing turmoil of confused and confusing progress. On a bright African noon we

embarked on board a French steamer for Marseilles. I must mention one man, whose acquaintance I made for the short time it took to cross the Mediterranean, and pass the custom-house at Marseilles. We happened to be seated beside each other at the table d'hôte of the steamer. I was struck with his Scotch look, and so were others on board. He had nothing of French about him to the eye, only the ear recognised him as a Frenchman. His motions were British, and he even spoke French with more deliberation than his countrymen. But he spoke English well, though he had never been in England, and had only commenced learning it when at the age of forty-five. He was now sixty-three. I asked him if he had read Tennyson. He said he had not, though he had his works on his book-shelves. My name,' said he, is Tennéson, only spelled with an e instead of a y. My grandfather used to tell me that we are of Scotch descent, and that our family came over to France with James the Second.' A most benevolent old man he seemed, attentive and kind to everybody. I happened to express a hope that they would not detain us long at the custom-house, else we should lose the train we wished to go by; which was of some consequence to me, as my purse was nearly empty, and I could not get it replenished before reaching Paris. He said, 'I shall be happy to lend you some; make yourself quite easy about that.' And this, though our routes diverged as soon as we reached our port; and I do not know that he even knew my name. He helped us through the custom-house, got a carriage for us, and sent us away with kindness. His benevolence had a happy combination of Scotch solidity and French politeness.

And now we hastened northward towards our own island; and the skies rose higher, and the stars were paler, and further apart, and more of mystery brooded in the wastes of heaven. For we drew nearer to that region of the North where the old hero, weary that the skies rested on the earth, pushed them aloft, that men might have room