r course along these exquisite blue waters, and soon have a
glimpse, at three miles distance, of an isolated, abrupt cone, trimmed
at the summit into the proportions of a pyramid. It is the hill of
Gouraya, an enormous mass of granite which lifts its scarped summit over
the port of Bougie, called Salda by Strabo. We approach and watch the
enormous rock seeming to grow taller and taller as we nestle beneath it
in the beautiful harbor. Bougie lies on a narrow and stony beach in the
embrace of the mountain, white and coquettish, spreading up the rocky
wall as far as it can, and looking aloft to the protecting summit two
thousand feet above it. We abstain from dismounting, but sweep the city
with field-glasses from the deck of the ship, recollecting that Bougie
was bombarded in the reign of the Merrie Monarch by Sir Edward Spragg.
We trace the ravine of Sidi-Touati, which breaks the town in half as it
splits its way into the sea. Here, in 1836, the French commandant,
Salomon de Mussis, was treacherously shot while at a friendly conference
with the sheikh Amzian, the pretext being the murder of a marabout by
the French sentinels. The incident is worth mentioning, because it
brought into light some of the nobler traits of Kabyle character. The
sheikh, for killing a guest with whom he had just taken coffee, was
reproached by the natives as "the man who murdered with one hand and
took gifts with the other," and was forced by mere popular contempt from
his sheikhship, to perish in utter obscurity.

[Illustration: ROMAN RELICS AT PHILIPPEVILLE.]

Putting on steam again, we recede from Bougie, and passing Djigelly,
with its overpoweringly large barracks and hospital, doubling Cape
Bougarone and sighting the fishing-village of Stora, we arrive at the
new port-city of Philippeville. This colony, a plantation of Louis
Philippe's upon the site of the Roman Russicada, has only thirty-four
years of existence, and contains twenty Frenchmen for every Arab found
within it. It differs, however, from our American thirty-year-old towns
in the interesting respect of showing the traces of an older
civilization. French savants here examine the ruins of the theatre and
the immense Roman reservoirs in the hillside, and take "squeezes" of
inscriptions marked upon the antique altar, column or cippus. On an
ancient pillar was found an amusing grafita, the sketch of some Roman
schoolboy, showing an _aquarius_ (or water-carrier) loaded with his twin
b