y, eggs,
fruit, lean poultry and herbs. The young ladies, there as in other parts
of the world, come not to sell, but to shop. Things of Paris are not
wanting to encourage this propensity, which grows by what it feeds on,
and promotes the civilization of the country by the creation of
artificial wants.

[Illustration: AN IMPROVISED GOBLET.]

Brushing through dewy thickets of lentisk and rose-bay, or drawn sharp
against the vivid African sky on the summit of a bare spur, groups of
mountaineers with their wares and their flocks wend their way at dawn to
the market. It has the air of a unanimous turn-out of the family, all
who can walk or be carried, with dogs, goats, sheep, asses and cattle,
yielding to the common attraction. The Kabyles, unlike the Arabs, do not
smoke, making up for that privation by a much greater consumption of
meat. The marketers of the Beni-Menguellet will swallow for breakfast
and dinner two score oxen and twice as many sheep and goats. The
butchering is done on the spot, or rather hard by, usually by negroes
who make it their profession, and journey from fair to fair with the
outfit of knives and steel and a reed flute to beguile the way with
genuine African melodies. The Kabyles have no higher use for the negro,
the post of seraglio-guard assigned him among wealthier and more
orthodox Moslems being a sinecure with them.

When we remember that these large commercial reunions are held as often
as each week, we are prepared to recognize a degree of movement and
energy sufficient of itself to separate sharply the Kabyles from their
Asiatic coreligionists. Repose is not their chief luxury. The charms of
_kief_ are less irresistible than to the Arab or the Turk. The mere
labor, indeed, of reaching their rock-built homes exacts considerable
bodily exertion. Compared with a daily climb of some hundreds of feet
when the ploughman homeward takes his weary way, the toil of the
harvest-field below looks like recreation. A life which keeps the blood
circulating so rapidly cannot fail to develop a hardy race full of the
pride born of conscious strength, and not disposed to yield readily to
lords who exhaust their physical powers in scaling their eyries. Long
training has given the natives something of the agility of the monkeys
with which they share the crags. Kabyle sharpshooters obstructed the
completion of French hill-forts by ascending the parapet at night and
waking the garrison and the workmen with a s