negro tent-guards; and here he sheltered his lowly head, whose attitude was perpetually bowed by the habitual weight of his cowl.  The French soon became jealous, and encroached upon their treaty.  The duke of Orleans, we are told, had Abd-el-Kader’s seal counterfeited by a Jewish coiner at Oran, and with passports thus stamped sent scouting-parties toward the sultan’s dominions, protected by the sultan’s forged safe-conduct.  Open conflict followed, and a succession of French razzias.  In 1845, Colonels Pelissier and St. Arnaud, under Marshal Bugeaud, conducted that expedition of eternal infamy during which seven hundred of Abd-el-Kader’s Arabs were suffocated in a cave-sanctuary of the Dahra.  This sickening measure was put in force at a cul-de-sac, where a few hours’ blockade would have commanded a peaceful surrender.

[Illustration:  KABYLE WOMEN.]

“The fire was kept up throughout the night, and when the day had fully dawned the then expiring embers were kicked aside, and as soon as a sufficient time had elapsed to render the air of the silent cave breathable, some soldiers were directed to ascertain how matters were within.  They were gone but a few minutes, and then came back, we are told, pale, trembling, terrified, hardly daring, it seemed, to confront the light of day.  No wonder they trembled and looked pale!  They had found all the Arabs dead—­men, women, children, all dead!—­had beheld them lying just as death had found and left them—­the old man grasping his gray beard; the dead mother clasping her dead child with the steel gripe of the last struggle, when all gave way but her strong love.”

Abd-el-Kader’s final defeat in 1848 was due less to the prowess of Lamoriciere and Bugeaud than to the cunning of his traitorous ally, the sultan of Morocco, who, after having induced many of the princely saint’s adherents to desert, finally drove him by force of numbers over the French frontier.  Confronting the duke of Aumale on the Morocco borders, he made a gallant fight, but lost half his best men in warding off an attack of the Mencer Kabyles.  Fatigued now with a long effort against overwhelming pressure, and world-weary, he met the duke at Nemours, on the sea-coast close to the Morocco line.  Depositing his sandals, Arab-fashion, outside the French head-quarters, he awaited the duke’s signal to sit down.

“I should have wished to do this sooner,” said the broken chief, “but I have awaited the hour decreed by Allah.  I ask the aman (pardon) of the king of the French for my family and for myself.”

Louis Philippe could not come in contact with this pure spirit without an exhibition of Frankish treachery, like tinder illuminating its foulness at the striking of steel.  The sultan’s surrender was conditioned on the freedom to retire to Egypt.  The French government no sooner secured him than it treacherously sent him to prison, first to the castle of Pau, then to that of Amboise near Blois, where he was kept from