by the Greek term canon (kanoun).  An institution of great protective use, in practice, is the safe-conduct, or anaya, a token given to a guest, traveler or prescript, and which protects the bearer as far as the acquaintance of the giver extends:  it may be a gun, a stick, a bornouse or a letter.  The anaya is the sultan of the Kabyles, doing charity and raising no taxes—­“the finest sultan in the world,” says the native proverb.  The Kabyles press into all the towns and seaports for employment with the same independence as if they were a neighboring nationality.  They build houses, they work in carpentry, they forge weapons, gun-barrels and locks, swords, knives, pickaxes, cards for wool, ploughshares, gun-stocks, shovels, wooden shoes, and frames for weaving.  They weave neatly, and their earthenware is renowned.  In addition, they are expert and shameless counterfeiters.  Yes, the fact must be admitted:  these rugged mountaineers, so proud, and, according to their own code, so honorable, never blush to prepare imitations of the circulating medium, which they only know as an appurtenance and invention of their civilized conquerors.  In his rude hovel, with all the sublimities of Nature around him, this child of the wilderness looks up to the summits of the Atlas, “with peaky tops engrailed,” and immediately thereafter looks down again to attend to the engrailing of his neat five-franc pieces, which can hardly be told from the genuine.  This multiplication of finance was punished under the beys with death.  The bey of Constantina arrested in one day the men of three tribes notorious for counterfeiting, and decapitated a hundred of them.  There was lately to be seen at Constantina the executioner who was charged with this punishment, the very individual who cut off the ingenious heads of all these poor money-makers, and did not “cut them off with a shilling.”  He appeared to modern visitors as a modest coffee-house keeper in the Arab quarters, who would serve you, for two cents, a cup of coffee with the hand that had wielded the yataghan.  He was an old Turk, with wide gray moustaches, dressed in a remarkable and theatrical fashion.  He wore a yellow turban of colossal size, and an ample orange girdle over a dress of light green.  Poor Tobriz—­that was his name—­was violently opposed to the introduction of the guillotine in Algeria.  In the days of his prosperity an enormous sabre was passed through his flaming girdle.  In the early years of the French conquest Tobriz was employed in the decapitations, which were executed with a saw, and must have been a horrible spectacle.  He remembered well the execution of the hundred counterfeiters in one night, and their heads exposed in the market.

[Illustration:  THE IRON GATES.]