ITS STARVING POPULATION.

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Occasionally I saw where houses had been thrown down by the earthquake which happened two years since, and where others had been shaken from their upright position and made to lean against each other. It was clear to me that if the shock had been a little more violent, those narrow streets would have offered the inhabitants no means of escape, and that they would have been hopelessly entombed in their dwellings.

It was some time before I could find my way out of this maze of twilight lanes into the broad streets along the shore, full of light and of activity, and when I did so, it was like a return from the abodes of death to the upper world.

The melancholy impression which this ramble in the streets of Algiers left upon me was not without good reason. "They are dying very fast on the hills, poor creatures,” said a resident of Algiers to me the next morning; "their bodies are going to fill their cemeteries. Within two years past, we have had the cholera here, which swept them off by thousands; now they are perishing by famine, and the fevers of the country and other disorders occasioned by unwholesome nourishment. While Algiers was under the rule of the Deys, a native could subsist on a few sous a day, and this was a liberal allowance; now all the necessaries of life are dear, and they are starving; the trade with France has brought in French prices. While the prickly pear was in season, they lived upon that, the cheapest fruit of the country; what they live on now, I am sure I do not know. The

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A BEAUTIFUL SUNSET.

French government has lately taken some measures for their relief:"

That day closed as the most beautiful days of Italy close, with a glorious amber light at sunset, tinging the whole atmosphere, and streaming in everywhere at the windows, even those which looked north and east. We had dates that day for our dessert at the Hotel de la Regence, dates from the palms of the neighborhood, but they were not so fine as the dates of Elche, which we found at Alicante.

THE day after our arrival in Algiers was like one of the balmiest days of spring. We all went to see the great Mosque near the Place Royale. Before it, a portico of massive Saracenic columns encloses a court in which flows an abundant fountain for the ablutions of the worshippers. Within, the appearance is striking; the massive horseshoe arches, which are crossed by broad horizontal flutings, descend to low, heavy pillars, which have the effect of a grove of vast trunks, spreading upwards into lofty canopies. I cast my eyes beyond them, and there, looking no larger than insects beside these great columns, were half a dozen natives at their morning devotions. A strange-looking man, with an air of abstraction, was wandering about. "He is crazy," said a gentleman who had kindly conducted us to the mosque; "and being crazy, is regarded as a saint and called a marabout." Some of the columns of the mosque had been broken and a part of the wall damaged by the late earthquake, and workmen employed by the government were busy in repairing it.

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A PUBLIC GARDEN.

On our return from this building, we peeped into the hall of an Arab tribunal, where the muftis and cadis still dispense justice. It was a room of very moderate dimensions, on the lower floor, and at that time open to the street, but the magistrates were not in session, though their cushions were ready to receive them. At a little distance from this is the New Mosque, remarkable only for being built in the form of a church, under the direction of a Christian slave, and for the fate of the architect, whose head was struck off, by order of the Dey, for his audacity in making a temple of the faithful resemble the temples of the infidel.

We followed the main street northward till we issued from the city by the northern gate, the Bab-el-Wad, or River Gate; for here a ravine, called by the Arabs the river, descends to the sea, and overlooking it rise the northern walls and battlements of Algiers. From these battlements, they tell you, the Deys caused prisoners of state to be thrown alive, and their bodies being caught on the ends of iron spikes below, they were left to perish by slow tortures. Those who had the means bribed the executioner to strangle them before throwing them down. From the gate, a broad Macadamized road led us up to a public garden, laid out by the French, within which a winding walk, where a species of oxalis, new to me, made a beautiful deep green border, spotted with showy crimson flowers, separated beds filled with the fairest plants of the tropics. Among these was the India-rubber tree; and by the wayside were rows of young palms, of which those that were already ten or twelve years old had stems

MOSLEM

CEMETERY

AND CHAPELS.

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scarcely a foot in height, for the date-palm is of slow growth, and when it once germinates begins a life of many centuries.

In a nook of the garden stood a group of paper-mulberry trees, the leaves of which were withered and rolled up, as if scorched by fire or seared by frost. I inquired what might be the cause of this phenomenon. "It is the sirocco," answered the gentleman who was with us; 66 a sirocco which blew here three weeks since. No one, who has not felt the sirocco, can form any idea of its effects; it withers up vegetation in a few hours; it dries up the springs; it bakes the soil, and makes it open in long and deep clefts. Men and animals suffer as much as the plants and trees." The leaves of the paper-mulberry, which is a native of a moister climate, were, it seems, scorched beyond remedy by this wind of the desert, while the leaves of the native trees had recovered their freshness.

About this time the muezzin was proclaiming the noontide hour of prayer from the minaret of a mosque further up the hill, and towards this we proceeded, leaving the garden. We came first to a Moslem cemetery, and here we were in a sacred neighborhood; for here was not only a mosque, but two marabouts, or little Moslem chapels, each containing the remains of some holy man of the religion of Islam; and low arched passages led from one enclosure of the cemetery to another, and from mosque to marabout, and in these passages fountains were gushing for the ablutions of the faithful. Women in white, their faces covered with white veils, showing only the eyes, hovered about the graves, which looked quaintly,