on one side of the footpath to a balcony on the opposite side. He could promenade almost the whole town by means of the terraces and roofs of the buildings—a circumstance, says the old monkish chronicler, with a touch of quiet humour, of which the light-footed thieves take every advantage. The white, one-storeyed houses, viewed from the Mediterranean, seemed to rise above each other like the tier on tier of some vast Roman amphitheatre. Five times each day, from the minaret galleries of a hundred mosques, the voice of the blind muezzin chaunted his adán-his call to prayer, with its solemn refrain of Aláhu akbar. To-day the entire province of Algiers possesses but two genuine specimens of representative Oriental architecture-the Grand Mosque and the mosque at Sidi Okba, beyond Biskra. The combined influences of the Zouave, the Chasseur d'Afrique, and the cosmopolite tourist have murdered the Eastern interest of Algiers; but, at least, the relentless extinction of the picturesque by these exacting vagabonds has been accompanied by an improvement in the material conditions of existence for which Cervantes and his unhappy fellow prisoners must have often sighed.

The population at that time was divided into the two exhaustive classes of freemen and slaves. The slaves, some twenty-five thousand in number, were mostly Christians, while the bulk of the freemen consisted chiefly of Turks, Moors, and Jews. Among the Turks were enrolled the renegades of all sects and climes, and these, after the manner of their kind, proved the sternest, harshest taskmasters. The lot of

the galley-slaves was so unutterably wretched that exaggeration can scarcely misrepresent it, and, with a characteristic refinement of cruelty, the logical minds of their captors led them to treat most harshly those slaves who by social rank or previous education were likely to be able to endure least. But it would be unjust to deny to the Algerine satrap the possession of the faculty of judicious discrimination. Those who were fortunate enough to have the easier, lighter tasks apportioned to them sold water in the streets, and were soundly flogged if their own remissness, or the absence of thirst on the part of the passers-by, caused their receipts to fall below the minimum sum appointed by the peremptory fiat of their owners. They washed linen, calcined walls, cleansed the putrid streets, acted as nurses to the Moorish children, and tended the flocks and herds. Such were the unlaborious tasks allotted by the thoughtful humanity of the slaveowners to the enfeebled victims of decrepitude and old age. The unhappy beings who laboured under the fatal disadvantages of youth and vigour were yoked with horse, ass, or ox, and forced to drag the primitive Moorish plough over the sterile plains. When their labours in the quarries were ended they were harnessed to carts, while the whip was freely used to quicken the faint steps of the wretched victims as they carried the vast, rough blocks of stone to the site where they were to erect the harem of some debauched pro-consul. In the last resort they were compelled to carry out the hideous duties of the public executioner. The code

of punishment existing in this realm of Azrael was as cruel as it was summary. Slaves were stoned, tied to a horse's tail and whirled over rugged pebble pavements against the sharp edges of projecting walls; they were impaled, buried alive, bastinadoed to death, broken on the wheel, torn asunder by boats, or hung up by the ankles with their ears and noses slit.1

If the destiny of the Christian slave was one of the most aggravated cruelty, the lot of the Jewish freeman-though a common hatred of the Christian dogs might have been expected to unite the Israelite and the Mahometan-was not without its trials and degradations. Rightly or wrongly, the Jews had acquired an infamous reputation as coiners of false money, and Turks, Moors, and Christians joined in treating the supposed criminals with the most brutal manifestations of arrogant contempt. A Moorish boy meeting a wealthy, elderly Rabbi in the open street would order him to remove his cap, and make him humbly lift his hand to his bared head in token of submission. The unfortunate Hebrew crying his wares for sale would occasionally be brought to a halt at midday and ordered to take off his sandals, with which some white-burnoused young Turk would strike the wretched Israelite upon the mouth amid the jeers of the bystanders. So great was the contemptuous hatred with which the Jew was regarded that, when any dispute arose between a Christian and a Jew, the sympathies of the Moslem were always with the 1 Dan, pp. 405-407. Haedo, f. 8.

Frankish slave.1 But for all his ignominy and humiliation the Israelite received the recompense which was sweetest to him. The commerce of the province was almost entirely in his hands. The trading vessels from far-off lands, armed with the protection of a safeconduct, thronged the ports with cargoes for him. England sent her tons of ore, her miles of cloth; French galleons supplied the harems with lace and veil-cloths; Valencian brigantines brought pearls and wine and specie, and Catalonian argosies filled the air with the voluptuous odours of rich scents and perfumed waters; Genoa unrolled her bales of velvets, of silks and damasks, while her Venetian rival displayed her wealth of inlaid coffers, brazen tripods, and coloured glasses. As the middlemen in all this traffic the long-suffering children of Abraham found their account.

It seems strange indeed that this nest of corsairs should have been the centre of a flourishing trade, while away on the Mediterranean their galleys struck terror into the crews of peaceful merchantmen. Christian and ex-Christian brains and hands created and sustained the prosperity of Algiers. Christian slaves worked at the oar while Christian renegades directed the policy of the State. All posts of high authority among the ruling class were filled by renegades. It

1 Haedo, ff. 19 and 23. His estimate of the Jews is highly characteristic, especially in the little touch of self-complacency with. which he says: "Todos muy ignorantes, y grandemente pertinazes en sus ceremonias y sueños Iudaycos, porque lo he esperimētado y disputado con algunos, no pocas vezes."

is not needful to believe unquestioningly the odious details set out with so much minuteness by Haedo; nor will the indulgent student of human infirmity mete out to these unfortunates the stern judgment of that moralising chronicler. Yet it must be admitted that if the motives of their conversion were not beyond suspicion, their subsequent lives touched the nadir of infamy and social degradation. Abandoned to the most loathsome and disgusting vices, their open disregard of morality and their flagrant violation of the elementary principles of common decency would have scandalised the inhabitants of the Cities of the Plain. But the very nature of their crimes forms a protection against exposure.

1

No inns existed in the town, and the trading Christians who entered Algiers were compelled, since no true believer would suffer their shadows to pollute his threshold, to seek lodging in the houses of the detested Jews. The Moslem pilgrims on the road to holy Kairwân slept in the mosques, which still throughout the East afford the poorer wayfarer that shelter which in the Iceland of to-day the wealthier traveller finds in the village chapel. But though inns were wanting, there was a superabundance of drinking taverns where food and wine were sold. These houses were usually managed by Christians. "O ye that believe! Verily wine, and the casting of lots, and images, and divining arrows, are an abomination from the works of Satan: shun them,

1 Haedo, ff. 9-10, 27-28, 32-39. Dan, pp. 332, 336, 338, 343, 345-347.