ng home
with his _diss_, or strings of chops and cutlets, festooned from his
spear or garlanded around his gallant brow.

Such is the drift of the times. Mankind is banded against brigandage.
Never was an ancient and honorable profession so sadly under the weather
everywhere. When it flares up into momentary life in Sicily or Attica
the newspapers seize hold of the event, a reporter is promptly on the
spot, and the bandit-chief is interviewed as coolly as though he had
merely shot his wife, bought a legislature or effected a triumphant
corner in mess pork. Such depressing influences cannot but wear down the
noblest calling. Sicily is tamed, and Circassia, the Asiatic Kabylia,
nearly so. A recent French tourist in Algeria was much struck with
certain resemblances between the two mountain-races separated by the
length of the Mediterranean and the Euxine. At the Kabyle rock-village
of Tighil-boukbair the town band turned out to receive him. It consisted
of a flute and two tambourines. Both the instruments and the airs
appeared to him identical with those to which he had listened in the
gorges of frosty Caucasus. At Tiflis he had "assisted" at a concert
almost the duplicate of the African entertainment. To make the
resemblance perfect, it would have sufficed, he says, to strip the
Caucasians to a single undergarment.

The same seeker of the picturesque describes a wayside scene
characteristic alike of landscape, dress and manners. What can be more
sensational than a draught of spring-water, under the shadow of a great
rock in a weary land, from the hollowed palm of a Kabyle girl surrounded
by her juniors arrayed in a costume that can neither be described nor
expressed, for the simple reason that it does not exist? A group like
this carries us back to within easy hail of the primal simplicity of
Eden. And a period little later than that of Adam and Eve is suggested
by the experience of the same traveller at his halt a few hours later.
As Abraham, according to the custom of his day, was ready for the three
angels with a substantial lunch, so the official Frenchman is the
beneficiary of a regulation which entitles him to an abundant _diffa_,
or provender for man, horse and attendants, supplied by the nearest
village. The Gaul is not always an angel, but his appetite is none the
worse for that. Butter does not usually appear in the bill of fare, but
its absence is amply atoned for by couscoussou, or African vermicelli,
mutton