the lassitude of a great purpose foiled, can
have but one result. Dimmed to-day, as our hurrying century so rapidly
dims her brightest renowns, Abd-el-Kader's existence has only to cease
and his memory will assume the sacred splendor of the tomb.

Hapless Washington of a betrayed revolution! In these latter days of
enforced quiet in Palestine how his early scenes of African experience
must have flooded his mind!--his birth, sixty-six years ago, in a
family group of Moslem saints; the teachings of his beautiful mother
Leila and of his marabout father; his pilgrimage when eight years old
to Mecca, and his education in Italy; his visions among the tombs, and
the crown of magic light which was seen on his brows when he began to
taste the enchanted apple; then, with adolescence, the burning sense
of infidel tyranny that made his home at Mascara seem only a cage,
barred upon him by the unclean Franks; and soon, while still a youth,
his amazing election as emir of Mascara and sultan of Oran, at a
moment when the prophet-chief had just four _oukias_ (half-dimes) tied
into the corner of his bornouse!

"God will send me others," said young Abd-el-Kader.

[Illustration: AN AGHA OF KABYLIA HUNTING WITH THE FALCON.]

The tourist remembers the trinity-portrait of him, by Maxime David, in
the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris, where his face, framed in its white
hood, is seen in full, in profile and in three-quarters view. The
visage is aquiline, olive-tinted, refined; but we can describe it
more authentically in the terms of one of his enemies, Lieutenant
de France, who became his prisoner in 1836, and who followed his
movements for five months, taking down his daily talk and habits like
a Boswell, but leaving nothing in his narrative that is not to the
sultan's credit. Of Abd-el-Kader at twenty-eight the lieutenant says:
"His face is long and deadly pale, his large black eyes are soft
and languishing, his mouth small and delicate, and his nose rather
aquiline: his beard is thin, but jet-black, and he wears a small
moustache, which gives a martial character to his soft, delicate face,
and becomes him vastly. His hands are small and exquisitely formed,
and his feet equally beautiful." Every interlocutor leaves a similar
portrait, impressing upon the mind the image of some warrior-saint of
the Middle Ages, born too late, and beating out his noble fanaticism
against our century of machines and chicanery.

[Illustration: THE DISCIPLES OF