are foolishly willing to give; but the prices are
essentially " fancy" ones, and the cigars
themselves but the sweepings of the French Régie.

Given a fine Sunday afternoon, and several
hundreds of military men swaggering or strolling
along in the direction of a café where a cock-
fight is about to take place; the odds in England,
I opine, would be laid on all those military men
being intent on witnessing the cock-fight in
question. Did your betting lay that way in
Algeria, however, you would lose. Every
nationality here has its special and exclusive
Sunday amusement; but cock-fighting is not
one to which the French are addicted.
"Comment!" they would cry. " Spend two hours
in seeing two miserable birds peck one another
to pieces: mais c'est une horreur!" The
Frenchman's Sunday means a long day of
dawdling, of staring at shows and sights, of
ogling pretty girls, of sipping moderate and
thin potations, and of winding up at billiards or
the play. The French officers have an
occasional bout at partridge-shooting or pig-sticking,
and, at outlying stations, can cultivate
perilous laurels, if they choose, in hunting the
lion; but ideas of " Le Sport," as it is understood
in France, have not yet penetrated to
Cæsarean Mauritania. Horse-racing languishes.
Many of the Mahomedan gentlemen have
magnificent studs of thorough-breds, but they decline
to enter their full-blooded Arabs for plates
unless the French owners of racehorses can
exhibit a faultless pedigree with each of the
horses they enter. And a racer must have a
very long pedigree to match with one in the
studbook of an Arab sheikh. The native gentry,
too, are great falconers; but the French scarcely
know a hawk from a hernshaw, and usually
regard a falcon as a kind of semi-fabulous bird,
not often seen out of heraldic scutcheons, and
which ladies used to wear on their wrists like
bracelets some time in the dark ages. The
Arabs understand cock-fighting, and among
themselves can enjoy it keenly; but, on the
whole, they prefer the contests of quails, and
even of pheasants— which are here " game" to
the backbone, and desperately pugnacious— to
those of cocks. Moreover, they never bet;
and to Europeans a cock-fight without money
won and lost is as insipid as card-playing for
"love." The real amateurs, aficionados as
they call themselves, of cock-fighting are the
Spaniards, of whom there are some thousands
domiciled in Algiers, either as agriculturists, as
mechanics, or as shopkeepers. They wear
their national costume; speak very little French;
scowl at the Arabs as though they were the
self-same Moriscos whom they were wont to
persecute in Spain; and have their own church
and their own priests.

The jewellers' shops in Algiers are full of
rudely fashioned representations in silver of
human eyes, noses, arms, legs, and ears; and
these I used to take at first as being in some
way connected with the Mahomedan superstition
of the evil eye; but in reality they are
votive offerings, and their chief purchasers are
Spaniards, who devoutly hang them up on the
altars of favourite saints, in gratitude for their
recovery from deafness, toothache, chilblains,
ophthalmia, or otherwise, as the case may be.
For the rest, these Algerine Spaniards, usually
emigrants from Carthagena and Valencia, are
peaceable citizens enough, and give the government
but little trouble. They are honest,
industrious, and eminently temperate—bread,
garlic, tobacco, and cold water being their
principal articles of diet. They occasionally
indulge in stabbing affrays when arrears of ill
feeling, arising from bygone cock-fighting and
card-playing disputes, are cleared up; but as a
rule the use of the knife is strictly confined to
the family circle. Pepe has it out with José,
and then the thing is hushed up, and the swarthy
gentleman who is taken to the hospital with a
punctured wound beneath the fifth rib is
reported to have accidentally slipped down upon
an open knife as he was cutting the rind of a
piece of cheese. They don't run mucks, and
they seldom stab the gendarmes. They are
inveterate gamblers and finished cock-fighters.
The Maltese sailors, of whom there are usually
a numerous tribe in Algiers, belonging to the
speronares in port, are likewise enthusiastic
admirers of the gallimachicart; but the Spaniards,
to cull a locution from the pit, " fight shy " of
the brown islanders. Your Maltese, not to
mince matters, is a drunken, quarrelsome dog,
fearfully vindictive, as lazy as a clerk in the
Powder Puff office, and a great rogue. Rows
are rare at Algerian cock-fights; but if ever a
difficulty occurs, and the sergents de ville are
called in, the Maltese are sure to be at the
bottom of it.

Cafés, breweries with gardens attached, and
dancing-saloons, are plentiful in the neighbourhood
of Algiers. As the road grows crowded
and more crowded with soldiers and sailors, with
French workmen in blouses, and French farm-
labourers in striped nightcaps and sabots; with
German artisans with their blonde beards,
belted tunics, and meerschaums; with little
grisettes and Norman bonnes with their high
white caps; with grave, dusky Spaniards in
their round jackets, bright sashes, pork-pie hats,
clubbed hair and earrings; with Greek and
Italian sailors, and fishermen from the Balearic
Isles, all mingled pell-mell; with the Jews in
their gorgeous habiliments, clean white stockings
snowy turbans, and shiny shoes; with the Jewish
women with high conical head-dresses of golden
filigree, and long falling veils of lace, and
jewelled breastplates, and robes of velvet and
rich brocade; with Arabs in white burnouses
and flapping slippers, who stalk grimly onward,
looking neither to the right nor to the left;
with Berbers and Kabyles swathed in the most
astonishing wrap-rascals of camel's hair, and
goat's hair, and cowskin; with fez-capped, bare-
footed, and more than half bare-backed Arab
boys, shrieking out scraps of broken French;
with Zouaves, so bronzed and so barbaric in
appearance as to make one doubt whether they
have not turned Mussulmans for good and all;
with sellers of fruit, and sherbet, and dates, and
sweetstuff, and cigars, and lucifer-matches, you