s, the janizaries went to
Turkey, and Algeria became French.

From this time the country became more or less open, according as France
could keep it quiet, to the inroads of that modern beast of ravin, the
tourist. The Kabyle calls the tourist _Roumi_ (Christian), a form,
evidently, of our word Roman, and referable to the times when the bishop
of Hippo and such as he identified the Christian with the Romanist in
the Moorish mind.

Modern Algiers, viewed from the sea, wears upon its luminous walls small
trace of its long history of blood. As we contemplate its mosques and
houses flashing their white profiles into the sky, it is impossible not
to muse upon the contrast between its radiant and picturesque aspect
and its veritable character as the accomplice of every crime and every
baseness known to the Oriental mind. To see that sunny city basking
between its green hills, you would hardly think of it as the abode of
bandits; yet two powerful tribes still exist, now living in huts which
crown the heights of Boudjareah overlooking the sea, who formerly
furnished the boldest of the pitiless corsairs. To the iron hooks of the
Bab (or gate) of Azoun were hung by the loins our Christian brothers who
would not accept the Koran; at the Bab-el-Oued, the Arab rebels, not
confounded even in their deaths with the dogs of Christians, were
beheaded by the yataghan; and in the blue depths we sail over, whose
foam washes the bases of the temples, hapless women have sunk for ever,
tied in a leather bag between a cat and a serpent.

The history, in truth, is the history--always a cruel one--of an
overridden nation compelled to bear a part in the wickedness of its
oppressors. This rubric of blood may be read in many a dismal page.
Algeria was a slave before England was Christian. The greatest African
known to the Church, Augustine, has left a pathetic description of the
conquest of his country by the Vandals in the fifth century: it was
attended with horrible atrocities, the enemy leaving the slain in
unburied heaps, so as to drive out the garrisons by pestilence. When
Spain overthrew the Moors she took the coast-cities of Morocco and
Algeria. Afterward, when Aruch Barbarossa, the "Friend of the Sea," had
seized the Algerian strongholds as a prize for the Turks, and his system
of piracy was devastating the Mediterranean, Spain with other countries
suffered, and we have a vivid picture of an Algerine bagnio and
bagnio-keeper from the pen