walked, meditating
on his youth of profligacy and vain scholarship, and over the abounding
Divine grace which had saved him for the edification of all futurity.

[Illustration: SHOPKEEPER AT BONA.]

Bona has a street named Saint Augustine, but it is, by one of the
strange paradoxes which history is constantly playing us, owned entirely
by Jews, and those of one sole family. This fact indicates how the
thrifty race has prospered since the French occupancy. Formerly
oppressed and ill-treated, taxed and murdered by the Turks, and only
permitted to dress in the mournfulest colors, the Jew of Algeria hid
himself as if life were something he had stolen, and for which he must
apologize all his days. Now, treated with the same liberality as any
other colonist, the Jew indulges in every ostentation of dress except as
to the color of the turban, which, in small towns like Bona, still
preserves the black hue of former days of oppression. On Saturdays the
children of Jacob fairly blaze with gold and gay colors. On their
working days they line the principal streets, eyeing the passers-by with
a cool, easy indifference, but never losing a chance of business. In
Algeria this race is generally thought to present a picture of
arrogance, knavery and rank cowardice not equaled on the face of the
globe. An English traveler saw an Arab, after maddening himself with
opium and absinthe, run a-mok among the shopkeepers who lined the
principal street of Algiers. Selecting the Hebrews, he drove before him
a throng of twenty, dressed in all the colors of the rainbow, who
allowed themselves to be knocked down with the obedience of ninepins. A
Frenchman stopped the maniac after he had killed one Jew and wounded
several, none of them making any effort at defence.

A few narrow streets, bordered with Moorish architecture, contain the
native industry of Bona. It is about equally divided between the Jews
and the M'zabites, who, like the Kabyles, are a remnant of the
stiff-necked old Berber tribe. The M'zabites preserve the pure Arab
dress--the haik, or small bornouse without hood, the broad breeches
coming to the knee, the bare legs, and the turban rolled up into a coil
of ropes. Thus accoutred, and squatting in the ledges of their small
booths, the jewelers, blacksmiths and tailors of Bona are found at their
work.

Returning to Philippeville by land, and remaining as short a time as
possible in this unedifying city, which is a bad and overheated