nstruct
them. Kabylia proper is a part of the Algerine territory but a few hours
distant from the walls of Algiers, of the size of an average French
department, and having a population of one hundred and seventy-five to
the square mile--a ratio identical with that of France. But the new
province, like its new mother--or step-mother--country, had also its
outliers of territory and people. The Kabyles overflow east, west and
south. They nearly equal the Arabs of Algeria in numbers, the Mountain
Kabyles being estimated at five hundred and eighty thousand, and those
of the plain at three hundred and seventy-nine thousand, while the Arabs
count in all one million three hundred and eighty-five thousand. These
figures measure the extent to which the Oriental immigration has
supplanted the natives of Romano-Gothic Numidian origin. Its effect in
other respects has hardly been in a like proportion. It has imposed the
Mohammedan religion in a modified form, strangely mixed with relics of
older superstitions. In language it has wrought much less of a change,
though more than can be traced to either the Vandals or the Romans. In
physique and manners the difference between Arab and Kabyle remains
sharply drawn. The Arabs are gaunt and indolent dwellers in tents, as
they were in the days of Job, the spear their only implement; while the
Kabyles herd in towns, weave, forge and plough. Red beards, light eyes,
broad and round skulls and massive features are not unfrequent among the
Kabyle men, and in many of the villages the children are all blondes, as
are to a less degree the women.

[Illustration: OIL-WORKS.]

In nothing, perhaps, is the line more strongly drawn between the two
races than in the treatment of their females. The Asiatic seclusion of
women is unknown among the Kabyles. There are no harems and no veils.
If, in return, the Kabyle women are subjected to more of such unfeminine
employments as harvesting and turning the wheels of olive-mills, that
does not lessen the assimilation to Western usage, but rather increases
the resemblance between the life of the fair Africans and that of their
sisters among the peasantry of Europe. Carrying water, so characteristic
a female office in the East, as the artists are constantly reminding us,
is none the less so among the Kabyles. But it becomes a more serious
matter when the wells or streams are three or four hundred feet lower
than the site of the dwelling to be supplied. In such cas