different race from the Arabs, they are believed to be the aboriginal inhabitants of Northern Africa. Secure in their wild valleys, they have ever preserved their independence. Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Arabs, all failed to subdue them; and, although some of the tribes, whose territory is the least inaccessible, are now partially under the rule of the French, the maritime range, from the east of the Metidjah to Philippeville, remains unconquered. Their numbers are inconsiderable, roughly estimated at eighty thousand. This would give a fighting population of at most from sixteen to twenty thousand men; but that small force has been found efficient to preserve from foreign domination the almost impregnable fastnesses in which they dwell. Although the tribes wage frequent war amongst themselves, a common enemy unites them all. The attachment of the Kabyles to their country and tribe is remarkable. Like the Swiss, or the Spanish Galicians, they are accustomed to wander forth when young, and seek their fortune in other lands. Kabyle servants and labourers are found in all the towns and villages of Northern Africa. But if they learn that their tribe is threatened or at war, they abandon their situations, however advantageous, and hasten home, and to arms. They are very brave, but barbarously cruel, giving no quarter, and torturing their prisoners before cutting off their heads.

Their weapons are guns six or seven feet long, pistols, and yataghans, chiefly of their own manufacture, and the materials for which are found in their mountains, where they work mines of copper, lead, and iron. In their rude way, and considering the badness of their tools, they are tolerably ingenious. Amongst other things, they make counterfeit fivefranc pieces, sufficiently well executed to take in the less knowing amongst the Arabs. Their industry is great, and, besides the valleys, they cultivate the steep mountain sides, forming terraces by means of walls, such as are seen in the vineyards on the Rhine and in Switzerland. Possessing few horses, they usually fight on foot; and in the plain, their untutored courage is unable to withstand the discipline

of the French troops. Their charges are furious but disorderly; and when beaten back, they disperse to rally again at a distance. In the mountains, where the advantages of military organization have less weight, they are sturdy and dangerous foes, fighting on the guerilla plan, disputing each inch of ground, and disappearing from before their enemy only to fall with redoubled fierce ness upon his flank or rear. No foreigners can penetrate into their country, and even Arabs run great risk amongst them. Not long ago, Captain Kennedy informs us, a party of Arab traders, suspected by the Kabyles of being in the French interest, were murdered to a man. Most of them understand and speak the Arabic, but they have also a language of their own, called the Shilla or Sherwia, whose derivation it has hitherto been impossible to discover. They profess Islamism, but mix up with it many superstitions of their ancestors, and ascribe certain virtues to the symbol of the cross, which they use as a talisman and tattoo upon their persons. "It would seem from this," observes Captain Kennedy," that at least the outward forms of the early Christians had at one period penetrated into the heart of their mountains." That, however, like all that relates to the early history of the Kabyles, is enveloped in doubt and obscurity.

A barbarous practice, prevalent in Algeria before the French invasion, is still, Count St Marie tells us, adhered to by the Kabyles. The amputation of a limb, instead of being surgically performed, is effected by a blow of a yataghan. The stump is then dipped into melted pitch, to stop the bleeding. The barber is the usual operator. Until the French came, regular physicians and surgeons were unknown in Algeria.

Besides the Zouaves already referred to, the French have raised various other corps expressly for African service. Conspicuous amongst these are two regiments of light cavalry, composed of picked men, and known as the "Chasseurs d'Afrique." They are mounted on Arab horses; and in order to obtain a sufficient supply, each tribe has to furnish a horse as part of its yearly tribute.

The arms of the Chasseurs are carbine, sabre, and pistols; their equipment is light; their uniform plain, and well suited to the nature of the service. Wherever engaged, they have greatly distinguished themselves, and are proportionably esteemed in the army of Africa. The reputation of the Spahis stands less high. These consist of four regiments of native cavalry, under the command of the Arab general Yussuf, whose history, as related by M. St Marie, is replete with romantic incident. It has been said that he is a native of the island of Elba, and was captured, when yet a child, by a Tunisian corsair. Sold to the Bey, he was placed as a slave in the seraglio, and there remained until an intrigue with his master's daughter compelled him to seek safety on board a French brig, then about to join the fleet destined to attack Algiers. He made the first campaign as interpreter to the general-in-chief. His talents and heroic courage rapidly advanced him, and when the first regiment of Spahis was raised, he was appointed its colonel. Previously to that, he had rendered great services to the French, especially at Bona, when that town was attacked by Ben Aïssa. Landing from a brig of war with Captain d'Armandy and thirty sailors, he threw himself into the citadel, then garrisoned by the Turkish troops of Ibrahim, the former Bey of Constantina, who professed to hold the town for the French government, but had left his post. The Turks rose against their new leaders, and would have murdered them, but for the energy of Yussuf, who killed two ringleaders with his own hand, and then, heading the astounded mutineers, led them against the besiegers, who were totally defeated. The exterior of this dashing chief is exceedingly elegant and prepossessing. When at Paris he was called "le beau Yussuf," and caused quite a furore, especially among the fair sex. His portrait may still be seen in the various print-shops, side by side with Lamoricière, Bugeaud, and the other "great guns" of the "Armée d'Afrique."

The first Foreign Legion employed by the French in Africa was transferred to Spain in 1835, and there used up, almost to a man. Another has since been raised, composed of men of

all countries-Poles, Belgians, Germans of every denomination, a few Spanish Carlists, and even two or three Englishmen; the legion, like most corps of the same kind, is remarkable for the reckless valour and bad moral character of its members. The Polish battalion is the best and most distinguished. The others are not to be trusted; and only a very severe system of punishments preserves something like discipline in their ranks, where adventurers, deserters, and escaped criminals are the staple commodity. Bad as they are, they are eclipsed by the condemned regiments, known by the slang name of "Les Zephyrs." These are punished men, considered ineligible to serve again in their former regiments, and who are put together on the principle of there being no danger of contagion where all are infected. A taught hand is kept over them; they are insubordinate in quarters, but dare-devils in the field. It will easily be imagined that the duties assigned to these convict battalions are neither the most agreeable nor the least perilous. At present, however, a detachment is employed on no unpleasant service, the care of an experimental military farm, near the camp of El Arrouch, in the district of Constantina. Here they cultivate a considerable tract of land, both farm and garden, breed cattle, and supply the colonists with seeds, fruit-trees, and so forth. Workshops are attached to the farm, for the manufacture of agricultural implements. The men who work as artisans receive threepence, and the field labourers three halfpence, in addition to their daily pay.

"Since the commencement of the experiment," says Captain Kennedy, "the offences that have been committed bear but a small proportion to those that formerly occurred during a similar period in garrison." In these days of reform in our military system, might not some hints be taken from such innovations as these? If employment is found to diminish crime amongst a troop of convicts, it might surely be expected to do as much in regiments to which no stigma is attached, and the vices of whose members are often solely to be attributed to idleness and its concomitant temptations.

Of few men so largely talked of, and so justly celebrated, is so little positively known as of Abd-el-Kader. The contradictory accounts obtained from the tribes, the narratives of prisoners, who, from their very condition, were precluded from gathering other than partial and uncertain information, compose all the materials hitherto afforded for the history of this remarkable chieftain. Even his age, is a matter of doubt, and has been variously stated, although it appears probable that he is now about forty years old. Seeing the great difficulty of obtaining authentic information, Captain Kennedy has abstained from more than a brief reference to the Emir. At the period of his visit, Abdel-Kader was not in the field, and his whereabout was very vaguely known -the French believing him to be "somewhere on the frontiers of Morocco." In the absence, therefore, of trustworthy data, and of opportunities of personal observation, the captain says little on the subject. His reserve is unimitated by M. St Marie, who not only gives a detailed account of the Arab sultan, but prefixes to his book a portrait of that personage, with whom he claims to have had an interview. As regards the portrait, it may be as much like Abd-el-Kader as any other of the half-dozen we have met with, no two of which bore any similitude to each other. The account of the interview is rather marvellous. During his stay in the city of Algiers, M. St Marie

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went to breakfast with a young Belgian acquaintance, and found an Arab seated in his friend's room, smoking a pipe. Refreshments were offered to the stranger, and, whilst he discussed them, the count had an opportunity of studying his countenance. He was struck with the dignity of his manner and deportment, and with his air of intellectual superiority, and was given to understand that he was sheik of a tribe friendly to the French. Breakfast over, the Arab departed. Two days afterwards, M. St Marie met his Belgian entertainer. "You were very fortunate the other day," said the latter; "the Arab whom you saw, when breakfasting with me, was no other than the Emir himself." he proceeded to relate how-Abd-elKader had entered the city with a party of peasants, carrying some chickens, which he sold in the marketplace, to prevent suspicion of his real character. He pledged his word to the truth of this statement, of whose accuracy the count appears satisfied. His readers will possibly be more incredulous. As a traveller's story, the 66 yarn" may pass muster, and is, perhaps, not much out of place in the book where it is found. With it we conclude our notice of the rival "Algerias." Those who desire further details of Bedouin douars and French encampments, of camels and Kabyles, razzias and the like, may seek and find them in the chronicle of the English captain, and the varied, but less authentic pages of the foreign count.

WE spent last Sunday at Figgins's at Brixton, No. 2, Albert Terrace, Woodbine Lane. A hearty fellow good glass of port: prime cigar: snug box in the garden: and a bus every five minutes at the end of the road: a regular A.1. place for a Sunday out, and home again in an hour and a half to our paradise at ; but we are not going to give you our address, or we should be pestered to death with your visits. Suffice it to say that Figgins's is a good specimen of a citizen's villa near London. Now, there are several kinds of villas: there is the villa near London, and the villa not near: there is the villa in a row, and the detached villa: there is your lodge, and your park, and your grange, and your cottage ornée; and best of all, in our opinion, there is what is neither the one nor the other of all these-there is the plain old-fashioned country-house :once a cottage, then a farm, then a gentleman's house: irregular, odd, picturesque, unpretending, comfortable, and convenient. But Figgins's is a new slap-up kind of affair; built within the last two years, and uniting in itself all the last improvements and the most recent elegancies. He has settled himself in a neighbourhood quite the genteelest of that genteel district for, though merchants and men of yesterday, so to speak, the people of Albert Terrace show that they have respect for the good times of yore, and they admire the character of the fine old English gentleman: they pride themselves, moreover, on being a steady set of people, and they show their respect for things ancient even in the outward arrangements of their dwellings. Thus you enter each of the twenty little gardens surrounding each of the twenty little detached houses, through gates with Norman pillars at their sides, that would have done honour to Durham or Canterbury while the wooden barriers themselves are none of your radical innovations on the Greek style, nor any

of your old impious fox-hunting fivebars, but beautiful pieces of fretwork, copied from the stalls of Exeter Cathedral, painted so nicely in oak, and so well varnished, that Stump the painter must have out-stumped himself in their execution. Once within the gate, however, and the connecting wall-capped, we ought to have said, with a delicious Elizabethan cornice-all Gothic formality ends for the while; and you are lost in astonishment at the serpentine meanderings, the flowing lines, and the thousand attractions of the garden. An ill-natured friend, who went with us, took objection at the weeping ash, in the middle of the circular grass-plot in front of the door; but he altered his mind in the evening, when he found the chairs ranged under its sociable branches-and the Havannahs and sherry-coblers crowding the little table made to fit round the central stem. 'Twas a wrinkle that which he was not up to :-he was a Goth-a cockney. Figgins, though a Londoner, knows what's what, in matters of that kind; and shows his good taste in such a practical combination of the utile with the dulce. On either side of the house, the pathways ran off with the most mysterious windings among the rhododendrons and lilac bushes, and promised a glimpse of better things in the garden behind, when we should have passed through our host's atrium, aula, porticus, and viridarium. Figgins's house has its main body, or corps de logis, composed of two little bits of wings, and a wee little retiring centre-the former have their gables capped with the most elaborate

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barge-boards," as the architects term them, all fretwork and filigree, and swell out below into bay windows, with battlements at top big enough for Westminster Abbey. The centre has a narrow and exceedingly Gothic doorway, and one tiny bit of a window over it, through which no respectably-sized mortal has any chance

of getting his head: and again over this is a goodly shield, large enough to contain the blazoned arms of all the Figginses. The builder has evidently gone upon the plan of making the most of his design in a small compass; but he has committed the absurdity first of allowing subsidiary parts to become principals, and then of making the ornaments more important than the spaces: thus the centre is squeezed to death like a nut in a pair of crackers, and battlements, boards, and shield "engross us whole,' by the obtrusiveness of their size and workmanship. Nevertheless, this façade, such as it is, struck us as beating Johnson's house, in Paragon Place, all to nothing: there was something like the trace of an idea in it, there was an aim, or a pretension, at something whereas the other is really nothing at all, and its appearance indicates absolute vacuity in the central cerebral regions of its inventor. Figgins has two good rooms on the ground floor, a lobby and staircase between them, to keep the peace between their occupants, three good bed-rooms on his first, and four very small ones up amongst his gables: add to which, that he boasts of what he calls his future dressing-room, but what his wife says is to be her boudoir

-we forget where-but somewhere up the stairs. All this again is much better than the Paragon Place plan-it shows that men recover somewhat of their natural good sense when they get into country air.

Figgins has not got a great deal of room in his villa, it is true; but he and his nineteen neighbours are all suitably lodged; and when they all go up to the Bank every morning in the same omnibus, can congratulate themselves on emerging each from his own undivided territory; or when they all come down again in the afternoon, each in a different vehicle-(you never meet the same faces in the afternoon that you do in the morning trip: we know not why, but so it is, and the fact should be signalized to the Statistical Society)-they can each perambulate their own eighth of an acre with their hands under their coat-tails in solemn dignity; or their wife, while awaiting their arrival, and listening to

the beef-steaks giving an extra fiz, wanders round and round again, or, like Virgil's crow,

"Secum sola magnâ spatiatur arenâ."

If Figgins had but insisted on having the back of his residence plastered and painted to look more natural than stone, the same as the front-or, better still, if his ambition could have contented itself with the plain unsophisticated original brick, we should say nothing against his taste-'tis peculiar certainly, but he's better off than Johnson.

On the opposite side of Woodbine Lane, some wretch of a builder is going to cut off the view of the Albert Terrace people all over the narrow field, as far as the brick kilns, by erecting a row of contiguous dwellings some three or four storeys high, besides garrets, and they are to be in the last Attic style imported. One word is enough for them: the man who knowingly and voluntarily goes out of town to live in a house in a row, like those lines of things in the Clapham Road or at Hammersmith, deserves to be sent with his house to "eternal smash;" he is an animal below the range of æsthetics, and is not worth remonstrating with.

One of these next days, whren we take our hebdomadal excursion, we intend going to see old Lady de Courtain at Lowlands Abbey, nearyou can get to it in about twenty minutes by the Great Western. It is no abbey in reality, you know; there never was any Foundation on the spot further than what Sam Curtain, when he was an upholsterer in Finsbury, and before he got knighted, had laid down in the swampy meadow which he purchased, and thus bequeathed to his widow: but it's all the same; it looks like an abbey ;that is to say, there are plenty of turrets, and the windows have all labels over their heads, and there are two Gothic conservatories, and two Gothic lodges at each of the two Gothic gates; and there is a sham ruin at the end of the "Lake:" and if this is not as good as a real abbey, we should like to know what is. Old Lady de Courtain was perfectly justi