a journey to Teniet would be agreeable. Teniet may be reached direct from Algiers or Blidah by train to Affreville. Thence a diligence every other day in eight hours (8 fr.), a distance of forty miles.

[Affreville is a village so named from the Archbishop of Paris, who was shot at the barricades in June, 1848. It is, from its position, likely to become an important centre, and it is probable that it will be the junction of projected railways to Boghar and other places south. The streets are planted with rows of pepper-trees. It was the site of a Roman station, the name of which is uncertain. Good buffet at the railway station.]

The drive from Milianah as far as Affreville, through orchards of figs, pomegranates, and olives, with constant views of Milianah perched above on its rocky height, is charming. Beyond Affreville the route passes across the plain of the Chelif, which is crossed by a ford when the state of the river permits, or by a ferry. A bridge is projected.

The plain of the Chelif has almost all the characteristics of the Metidja; rich, flat, and swampy, it has proved itself equally fatal to the colonist, and yet holds out the same promise, when brought under cultivation, of wealth and prosperity. It is being abundantly planted with the lifegiving eucalyptus.

A thoroughly good road winds up from the plain, following the course of the stream Oued Massin, through a pretty and wooded country which gradually becomes wilder.

The caravansary of Anseur-el-louza, almost the half-way house, is beautifully situated on open ground, surrounded by fine woods of oak and pine. Here travellers may breakfast. The place is a favourite resort of sportsmen, as the thickets of the neighbourhood abound with partridges and

rabbits, while hyænas, jackals, and wild-boars are frequently met with.

Not far from this is a salt-stream, from which the natives have from time immemorial obtained supplies of this useful domestic article. It is chiefly collected by women, who scrape the saline deposit from the rocks.

Following the windings of the mountain streamlet which it crosses and recrosses, and passing through a picturesque glen, which, but for its foliage of tamarisk and carouba trees, and the oleander-crowded bed of the river, might almost be a choice bit of Welsh scenery, the road mounts upwards in the direction of Teniet.

Until very recently this road was a deplorably bad one, and it was hard to say which suffered most during its course, the unhappy occupants of the carriage or the wretched. horses which had to drag their load over rocks and through quagmires. In 1871, Colonel Vereker tells us how he, his carriage and horses literally and actually stuck in the mud, and had to be dragged out by main force! Since then the military road to Teniet has been completed, and the excitement and perils of the journey are so far lessened, but after heavy rains it is still very bad.

One very striking feature of the Algerine high-roads, is the small encampment of road-makers or menders, which is met with every now and then-cantonniers as they are called, and who seem to have a solitary life of it, as they are often the only beings passed for miles together. They are throughout the province either negroes or Spaniards, for curiously enough, as it seems, the Spaniard, who is so utterly averse to work in his own country, is found a most active labourer, though, perhaps, not a very honest one, in Africa. Most of the

crimes committed in the colony, thefts, and so on, are laid to the charge of the Spaniards, but whether this is a national prejudice it is hard to say. They form at least a very important body. The negroes as road-menders are decidedly the most striking objects, and as they sit by the roadside in their bright-coloured garments, hammer in hand, leisurely knocking away at the stones, their black skins thrown well up against the white of the road and the hedgerows of vivid green, they seem almost to be set down in the exact spots where they are found, by a beneficent arranger of picturesque effects, as startling studies of colour.

On the road to Teniet a curiously isolated hill, called "the sugar-loaf," is passed. It rises up in solitary grandeur out of the brushwood, its base scattered with huge fragments of rock, probably shattered by the same upheaval to which it owes its existence. The mountains round are rugged, and many of them bare, with walls of slaty-black rock like dismantled ramparts.

Teniet-el-Had, or the market of Sundays, is a bleak little village nearly 4,000 feet above the level of the sea, and it is seldom that the traveller coming from the sunny plains and hills of the Sahel, will visit it without vaunting as its chief merit the blazing and fragrant cedarlogs, which it is to be hoped he will find awaiting him on the inn hearth.

Hotels.-Du Commerce, good. The others very indif

ferent.

The excursion to the cedar-forest can be accomplished in a carriage, but the road is so very bad, that this mode of progression will probably be found the most fatiguing that could well be selected. Mules or horses are to be hired,

and the officers of the military-train maintain the character of national courtesy, by affording every possible assistance to foreigners, who may visit their lonely hill station. No side-saddles are to be obtained, the only feminine accommodation being a kind of iron pannier fitted with a footboard, which, when the mules walk, after their custom, at the edge of the mountain-path, gives a most unpleasant sensation to the rider of sitting completely over the precipice. A lady would do well to take her own saddle with her to Teniet.

of

The start to the cedars should be made early, if any the beauties of the forest are to be explored, and the best lights had for the views. Besides which it is not desirable to linger too late in the forest. Provisions must be taken.

A tolerably steep mount of about an hour and a half, leads to the outskirts of the forest, with ever-extending views of the surrounding country as the path winds upwards and upwards. The first cedars, which are eagerly looked for among a wood of evergreen oaks, are small and stunted, but as the higher ground is reached, they increase in grandeur and beauty, spreading out their stately branches over many yards, and rising in their giant growth to a height of from sixty to a hundred feet.

"La Sultane," the largest tree in the forest, has a diameter of nine feet, while under its branches, it is said, a hundred and twenty horsemen could shelter from the sun. "Sultan," now fallen, was even larger.

The

The sun shining upon the snow-covered ground through the dark cedar-branches has a marvellous effect, and the whole scene in its wildness, and greatness, and utter stillness, is most impressive, heightened not a little, perhaps, by the

scarred and ruined trunks-the result of the incendiarism or . carelessness of the Arabs-which in so many places strew the ground, and the corpse-like trees which raise to heaven their gaunt and skeleton forms, as though in mute and suffering protest, against the fate to which they refuse to

yield. Everywhere into the solemn silent scene, the presence of the great destroyer is obtruded, and with it an impression of suffering and struggle for life, which makes us feel an almost human sympathy with the tortured monarchs of the wood.

The snow is sometimes so deep as to render a visit to