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ASPECT OF THE COUNTRY.

left. I inquired what was the number of Spanish emigrants in the department of Oran. "There are twenty-eight thousand of them," I was answered, "mostly settled on the coast; the number of French is at most fourteen thousand."

We had with us, on landing, a few things which we brought on shore with the design of passing a night or two at Oran; these were carried into the Custom-house, where they were rigorously searched by a stupid fellow in uniform, who would scarcely be satisfied without unfolding every pocket-handkerchief, and turning every stocking inside-out. At length, it fully appearing that we were no smugglers, we were allowed to proceed. The road leading to Oran from the landing is a broad, hard, winding, parapeted highway, cut in the living rock which skirts the sea. One of the first cares of the French government has been to make macadamized roads along the coast, and from village to village, in a region where there had been no roads since the time of the Romans. We passed through the French neighborhood, where women were screeching at their children in the shrillest French, and military veterans in white mustaches were sitting before the doors. Half a mile beyond, we left, on our right, in a little recess of the mountains, the populous village of St. André, entirely peopled by Spanish emigrants. "That village," said our loquacious driver, "is only six years old." I was struck with the verdurous appearance of the shore along which we were passing. The crags that overhung the road sprouted with many different shrubs and herbs of the freshest green; here were beds of blue violets, patches of

ARRIVAL AT ORAN.

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young grass, white tufts of the sweet alyssum in the clefts of the rocks, and the face of the perpendicular precipices was often draped with pendant strings of a prostrate plant, having thick fleshy leaves, like the air-plant; a sight refreshing to eyes wearied with the glimmer of the sea.

We turned a projecting rock, and found ourselves at Oran, a city of forty thousand inhabitants, partly lying on the strand and rising up from the water through a ravine to the sides of the hills where stand its forts, old and new. Two lofty minarets overlook its dwellings, with the humbler towers of its two or three churches, and two broad, white, macadamized roads lead from the lower to the upper town. I shall long remember the sights that met our eyes on entering Oran; Arabs in their loose attire of dirty white, sitting in the sun, or walking by loaded donkeys; Zouaves strolling about in their Oriental garb of red and white turbans; soldiers in the ordinary French uniform, marching in companies; Jews in black caps or turbans, and black tunics, talking with Franks, and probably driving bargains; Spaniards in their ample cloaks, with one corner drawn over the mouth, to keep out their great dread, the pulmonia; masons and carpenters at work on buildings by the way-side; Franciscan monks in brown gowns; Dominican monks in white; Catholic priests in broad-brimmed Quaker hats, with long beards -for though they must be clean-shaved in Europe, they have permission to wear their beards in Algeria; French ladies in bonnets; French servant women in caps; Arab women toddling about, wrapped in white woollen from head to foot,

224 SIGHTS IN THE STREETS OF ORAN.

with but one eye uncovered; other Arab women in calico gowns and coarse crimson shawls on their heads, drawn over the lower part of the face; horsemen reining spirited steeds of Barbary-sometimes a French officer, sometimes a brown Arab, the better rider of the two, and proud of his horsemanship; camels with their drivers resting at an angle of the way; little drays drawn by a single horse or mule, briskly trotting along with an Arab driver; files of mules dragging loaded wagons, and tinkling their little bells, and rattling Droshkas rapidly driven past all these, on their way to the landing or some neighboring villages. Through this miscellaneous crowd we made our way up the hill, and alighted at the Hotel de France, where we found rooms looking upon a great public square, in which figures like those we had just seen were constantly passing to and fro, as in a phantasmagoria.

This letter is already so long, that it will not be possible for me to include in it all I have to say of my visit to Algeria; I therefore stop here for the present. Several of my letters from America congratulate me on having wandered beyond the limits of the commercial panic, which has so convulsed our own country. This may be true of Algeria, in which I now write, but it was not quite true of Spain. I had occasion, while at Malaga, to negotiate a draft on my banker at Paris; and being told that there would be no difficulty in doing it, I deferred taking any step in the matter till my return from Grenada. But the panic made its appearance in Malaga during my absence, like the sudden

SPREAD OF THE COMMERCIAL PANIC. 225

breaking-out of an epidemic. News of the great failures in Hamburg had been received, and several houses which were powerful and prosperous on Monday evening were bankrupt on Tuesday morning. Money seemed to have disappeared in the course of a night; to hear people talk, one would have supposed that there were not five hundred dollars in all Malaga. So I reduced my draft to half the sum I thought of at first, and even this amount would not have been obtained but for the special good offices of the Consul. I am happy to learn that in America the cloud is passing over, and that, one by one, the broken links of commercial intercourse are rejoined.

10*

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A MOSQUE.

LETTER XXI.

ORAN-ALGIERS.

STEAMER NORMANDIE, Off Majorca.

MALAGA, December 22d, 1857.

THE city of Oran was held for three centuries by Spain. In 1791 a terrible earthquake shook down a part of the town, and soon afterwards the Spaniards, thinking it not worth while to defend the remainder against the Algerines, who harassed them with continual hostilities, finally abandoned it. I was not surprised, therefore, to find in parts of the town a strong resemblance to those I had lately visited in Spain. Before our hotel, on the other side of the square, was a street of shops, and through this we walked. At its entrance sat half a dozen native vendors of small wares, with their legs tucked under them, on little platforms, in the open air. Of the shops, some were mere niches in the walls, where sat the Oriental traders among their goods; others occupied by the Franks were but little larger, and reminded me of the shops of Grenada and Malaga.

Taking another direction, we entered a street leading to the lower part of the city, and passed through a Moorish portal, rough with arabesque ornaments, into the court of the

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