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SCHOOLS AT FONDUCK.

was described to me as an active, intelligent young man. I visited a mixed and an infant school; and although there were only about twenty children in each, they were in excellent order. They are managed by the Sœurs Hospitalières. The mistress of the mixed school told me that many of the children were necessarily absent taking care of the cattle.

There is one particular in the French arrangements, which at Fonduck has certainly increased the despondency with which the population regard their future prospects. With the exception of a flat surface of about 200 acres, which is artificially irrigated and employed in the cultivation of tobacco, the immediate neighbourhood is not cleared; and the allotments of land which the concessionaires received are for the most part a mile off their habitations. This must add considerably to the fatigue-under any circumstances severe to which the cultivator is subjected in the summer; and when exhaustion comes upon him in the midst of his work, the distance of his home is an obstacle to his readily obtaining any wholesome refreshment, and naturally he has recourse to the portable spirit-flask. The uncleared bush immediately around the village is the more striking, as, after it is passed, the land is cultivated with insignificant interruptions, for some distance on each side of the road, all the way to the Maison Carrée. In fact, the spectator who stands on the site of the

EXTENSIVE CULTIVATION.

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deserted camp, and looks towards Algiers, will see, perhaps, the greatest continuous extent of cultivated land furnished by one view in the whole of Algeria. His eye will pass over a surface as flat as the Cambridgeshire fens. On the road which runs quite straight to the north-west as far as the eye can see, there are two villages (the village du Midi, and the Maison Blanche, both mainly inhabited by Spaniards) and some insulated houses, and in the distance may be seen other white specks indicating European farmhouses, about as thick, I should say, as the steammills in the fens.

I spent about three hours in rambling about the hills in the neighbourhood of Fonduck. Here the Atlas does not rise nearly so steeply as behind L'Arbâ, and the general character of the country was not unlike that through which the traveller passes who quits the South Western Railway at the Christchurch Road Station and drives across the country to the south, if, instead of heather and firs, one substitutes dwarf palms and lentisques growing to the height of five or six feet. Among the windings of the hills I came upon several Arab villages of small size. All the gourbis were of straw, and the soil was cultivated in patches of twenty or forty acres each where the ground was tolerably flat. These sedentary Arabs suffer a good deal from the wild boars, which find refuge in the uncleared brushwood,

and destroy their crops while green. Every Friday (which is their Sabbath) they have a regular battue. Three or four hundred of them form a circle of beaters, and drive the boars into a smaller space, until at last they break cover, and afford the sportsman the chance of a shot. The day before my visit seven had been killed in this way. The Arabs will not eat the flesh themselves, but they sell the carcases to the European settlers, and a rasher from one of them furnished my breakfast. A ride of four hours had given me a good appetite, but I nevertheless found the meat extremely hard on this as on other occasions.

The Maison Carréc, or, as it was called by the Turks, Bordj el Kantra (Fort of the Bridge or Pass), is a square building which, before the French invasion, served to defend the bridge over the Harash, and also to protect the herds belonging to the State, which pastured in the marshes of the lower Harash, at that time not even partially drained. The day after the occupation of Algiers, Bourmont sent a brigade to seize this prize, and also the horses in the breeding stables of the Dey, which were in the same locality, and at Rassauta, an equally marshy district on the way to Cape Matifou. But the Bey of Constantine, who had, as in duty bound, brought his contingent to the aid of his liege lord, as soon as the advance of the French upon Bouzarich and the attack of the Fort of the Emperor

showed that resistance was hopeless, set off to return to his own province, and swept all the cattle and horses away with him. The building is now used as a prison for Arab convicts sentenced for a longer period than a year. When I visited it there were 390 inmates; but the intendant told me that there were many more in France,-I suppose at Toulon. About 150 of them were at work, the most employed in making crin végétal, and some few in laying out a garden in the immediate neighbourhood of the building. The majority lie idle about the wards. At night they are kept seventy or eighty together in long rooms, which are lighted, but I did not understand that any surveillance was kept up. The moral effect of the punishment seems very questionable. During their imprisonment they pick up a little French from the soldiers who guard them; and when they are discharged, they form connexions with the worst part of the European population in the towns, by whose co-operation they become worse thieves than before. Such, at least, is the view of the officer in charge of the prison. He looked forward to the abolition of the establishment concurrently with a considerable extension of the prison at Lambessa, of which I shall speak in another place. Certainly, if physiognomy furnishes any means of judging of character, the prisoners had not improved by their detention in the Maison Carrée.

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IRRIGATED GARDENS.

The space between the sea and the road from the Maison Carrée to Algiers, is, after the bridge of the Harash is crossed, almost throughout occupied by Maltese and Spanish market gardeners. The soil is perfectly levelled, and irrigated by the method which universally prevails wherever an Arab population has set foot, viz. the chain of buckets and the well. All parts of the apparatus are made without a particle of iron being used. The buckets are jars tied to a rope of halfa, and the parts of the wheels are kept together with wooden pegs, where nails would ordinarily be used. The mules which turn the wheel appear to continue their work without any superintendence on the part of the owner: but I suppose he is near, although invisible, and would summarily punish any cessation on the part of the poor animals from their monotonous task.

Half way to Algiers is the village of Hussein Dey, where an enormous building which was formerly a summer palace of the Algerine Deys, now serves as a magazine for tobacco, of which the Government is the sole purchaser. The road which proceeds from this point direct to Algiers was shut up for the purposes of repair at the time I was there, and the traffic passed by another which runs westwards for about a mile, and joins the Algiers and Kouba road at the "Ruisseau" mentioned above.