'Oh que l'hirondelle est bien la type de la vraie sagesse, elle qui a su effacer de son existence, ces longs hivers qui glacent et engourdissent! DÈs que le soleil commence À dÉcroÎtre, sitÔt que les plantes jaunissent et qu'aux chaudes haleines du ZÉphyr succÈdent les froides rafales de l'aquilon, elle s'envole prudemment À tire d'ailes, vers les douces rÉgions embaumÉes du Midi.'

E come down the hills and back to Algiers, to find the winter in full bloom, and the 'winter swallows' in great force, In fact, so full of bustle is the town, and so frequent is the sight of English faces, and the sound of English voices, that it hardly seems like the place we had left a few weeks since.

It has been said that English people love sunshine and blue sky more than any other nation, and that the dwellers under the 'ciel nebuleuse du nord,' will go anywhere to seek a brighter clime; and it is a fact, the importance of which is hardly realised in England, that the African sun is producing a crop of English residents that is growing rapidly, and taking firm root in the soil, in spite of siroccos, in spite of earthquakes—without a thought of colonization in the strict sense of the word, and without, it must be added, any particular love for the French people.

The visitors, or tourists, are increasing also, and they are naturally, rather vulgarising our favourite places. Thus we hear of picnics at the Bouzareah, of balls at Mustapha, of 'trips' to Blidah by railway, and of 'excursions to the gorge of La Chiffa and back' in one day.

An amusing chapter might be written upon Algiers from the traveller's point of view, but one or two touches will suffice, to show the easy and familiar terms, on which our countrymen and country-women invade this stronghold of the French; once the 'city of pirates' and the terror of Mediterranean waters.

There is the cosmopolitan traveller, who, having 'done Europe,' finds Algiers, of course, rather 'slow,' by contrast; and there is the very matter-of-fact traveller, who finds it all vanity, and says,—'Take ever so copious a stock of illusions with you to the bright Orient, and within half-an-hour after landing, you are as bankrupt as a bank of deposit... and the end of it all is, that this city of the "Arabian Nights" turns out to be as unromantic as Seven Dials.' There are lady travellers, who (enjoying special advantages by reason of their sex, and seeing much more than Englishmen of Moorish interiors) are perhaps best fitted to write books about this country; there are proselytizing ladies, who come with a mission, and end by getting themselves and their friends into trouble, by distributing tracts amongst the Moors; and there are ladies who (when their baggage is detained at one of the ports), endeavour to break down the barriers of official routine in an unexpected way. 'The douane did not choose to wake up and give us our luggage,' writes one, 'it was such a lazy douane; and though I went again and again and said pretty things to the gendarmes, it was of no use.'

Another form of invasion is less polite, but it has been submitted to with tolerable grace on more than one occasion. Here is the latest instance. *

'Being anxious to obtain a sketch of one of the quaint streets of the upper town, I wandered one morning up its dark alleys and intricate byeways; and wishing to establish myself at a window, I knocked at a promising door, and was answered by a mysterious voice from behind a lattice; the door opened of itself, and I marched upstairs unmindful of evil. In the upper court I was instantly surrounded by a troup of women, in the picturesque private dress of the Moorish ladies, unencumbered with veil or yashmak.

'These ladies dragged at my watch-chain, and pulled my hair, until finding myself in such very questionable society, I beat a hasty retreat, flying down stairs six steps at a time, slamming the doors in the faces of the houris, and eventually reaching the street in safety, while sundry slow Mussulmans wagged their beards and said that Christian dogs did not often enter such places with impunity.'

It is pleasant to see with what good tempered grace, both the Moors and the French take this modern English invasion. We settle down for the winter here and build and plant vineyards, and make merry, in the same romping fashion that we do in Switzerland. We write to England about it, as if the country belonged to us, and of the climate, as if we had been the discoverers of its charms. But it is all so cozy and genial, and so much a matter of course, that we are apt to forget its oddity; we have friends in England who speak of Algiers with positive delight, whose faces brighten at the very mention of its name, and who always speak of going there, as of 'going home.'

We have principally confined our remarks to places near Algiers, omitting all mention of Oran and Constantine, because it is impossible to work to much purpose if we travel about, and these places are worthy of distinct and separate visits. The longest journey that we would suggest to artists to make in one winter, would be to the cedar forests of Teniet-el-Had, because the scenery is so magnificent, and the forms of the cedars themselves, are perhaps the wildest and most wonderful to be met with in any part of the world. Hitherto, almost the only sketches that we have seen of this mountain forest have been by our own countrymen and countrywomen, for French artists do not as a rule go far from Algiers.

With a few notable exceptions, * our experience of the works of Frenchmen in Algiers, has been anything but inspiring; we have known these artists closetted for weeks—copying and re-copying fanciful desert scenes, such as camels dying on sandy plains, under a sky of the heaviest opaque blue, and with cold grey shadows upon the ground—drawing imaginary Mauresques on impossible housetops, and in short working more from fancy than from facts; producing, it may be, most saleable pictures, but doing themselves and their clientelles, no other good thereby. It seems ungracious to speak thus of people from whom we invariably received civility and kindness; but the truth remains, we found them hard at work on 'pot-boilers' for exportation, and doing, like the photographers, a flourishing trade.

We should endeavour to spend most of our time in the country, if we wish to make progress. If we stay in Algiers we shall of course be liable to some interruptions; we shall be too comfortable and perhaps become too luxurious. We must not dream away our time on a Turkey carpet, or on our terrasse, charming though the view may be. There is too much scent of henna, too strong a flavour of coffee and tobacco, there are, in short, too many of the comforts of life; we had better be off to the hills, where the air is cooler, and where we can live a free life under canvass for a while. *

The tropical vegetation in Algeria gives continual shade and shelter, and the style of architecture, with cool open arcades to the houses, is admirably adapted for work; but failing the ordinary means of shelter, much may be done under a large umbrella, or from an ordinary military tent. In the Paris Exhibition of 1867, there were some portable, wooden Swiss houses, that seemed constructed for sketching purposes, as they could be taken down almost as easily as a tent, and removed from one place to another.

A few months, spent amongst the mountains, will have a wonderfully bracing effect on Europeans, because both the eye and the mind will be satisfied and refreshed; although, it is a curious fact that on the uneducated, such scenes have little, or no, influence.

We shall not easily forget 'the splendid comet of Arab civilization that has left such a trail of light behind it,' but cannot help remarking that neither the Arab in a state of nature, nor the Moor surrounded by every refinement and luxury, seem to be much influenced by the grace and beauty around them; and in this they do not stand alone, for it is, as we said, a notable fact? that contact with what is beautiful in scenery or in art, is of itself of little worth. *

What shall we say of the Sicilian peasant girl, born and bred on the heights of Taormina?

What of the Swiss girl who spends her life, knee-deep in newly-mown hay? Does beautiful scenery seem to inspire them with noble thoughts? Does being 'face to face with Nature,' as the phrase goes, appear to give them refined tastes, or to elevate their ideas? Does it seem to lead to cleanliness, to godliness, or any other virtue? The answer is almost invariably, 'No;' they must be educated to it, and neither the present race of Arabs nor Moors are so educated. They do not seem to appreciate the works of their fathers, and will, probably before long, fall into the way of dressing themselves and building dwellings, after the style of their conquerors.

With Europeans it is just the reverse, and the most educated and refined amongst us, are learning more and more to value, what an Eastern nation is casting off. We submit to the fashions of our time not without murmurs, which are sounds of hope. We put up with a hideous costume and more hideous streets—from habit or necessity as the case may be—but even custom will not altogether deaden the senses to a love for the beautiful. In costume this is especially noticeable.

What is it that attracts the largest audiences to 'burlesque' representations at our theatres? Not the buffoonery, but the spectacle. The eye robbed of its natural food, seeks it in a number of roundabout ways—but it seeks it. What made the American people crowd to Ristori's performances in New York, over and over again? Not the novelty, not alone for the sake of being able to say that they had been there; but for the delight to the eye in contemplating forms of classic beauty, and the delight to the ear in hearing the poetry of the most musical language in the world, nobly spoken, although but few of the audience could understand a word. It was a libel upon the people to suggest that their attending these performances was affectation; it was an almost unconscious drawing out of that natural love for the beautiful, which is implanted somewhere, in every human breast, and which, in this case perhaps, gave the American audience a temporary relief from smartness, and angularity of body and mind.

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