y at the base. The amin shows them with sad satire, saying in
explanation, "French Roumi:" it was the Christian French.

That is the term, meaning no compliment, which the Kabyle fits to all
Europeans alike. In vain the Frenchman, writhing with intellectual
repugnance, explains that he is not a Christian--that he is a
Voltairean, a creature of reason, an _illumine_. The Kabyle continues
to call him a Roumi, which will bear to be translated Romanist, being
imitated from the word Rome and applied to all Catholics. These same
tribes doubtless called Saint Augustine a Roumi, and he returned the
epithet Barbari or Berbers--a name which the emperors applied with
vast contempt to the hordes and mongrel population of exiles and
convicts that peopled Mauritania, and which the natives retained until
the Arab invasion, when they changed Berber for Kebaile.

The Romans conquered the shores and the plains. You find none of
their ruins among the mountains, where the Berbers, from the Roman
occupation to the French, have preserved an independence never
completely subdued.

The Kabyle villages are united into federations. If these federations
engage in quarrels--which is by no means rare--or if a village is
menaced by an enemy, signals are placed in the minarets to appeal
to the towns of the same party. These are easily seen, for all the
villages are on hilly crests and visible from a distance. From the
summit of Taourit el Embrank we can count more than twenty of these
Kabyle towns, perched on the peaks around us, and separated by
profound chasms.

[Illustration: TOBRIZ, AN ENEMY OF THE GUILLOTINE.]

Every trait points out the distinction between the Kabyles and the
surrounding Arabs. The Arabs seek laziness as a sovereign good; the
Kabyles are great artificers. The Arabs imprison their wives; the
Kabyle women are almost as free as our own. The Kabylian adherence to
the Mohammedan faith is but partial, and is variegated by a quantity
of superstitions and articles of belief indicating quite another
origin. While the Koran proclaims the law of retaliation, eye for
eye and tooth for tooth, the more humane Kabyle law simply exiles
the criminal for ever, confiscating his goods to the community. It
is true, the family of a murdered person are expected to pursue the
homicide with all the tenacity of a Corsican vendetta, but the tribal
laws are kept singularly clean from the ferocity of individual habits.
A strange thing, indicating pro