Men of rank and wealth, like Ben-Ali-Cherif, turn the Tofailian into a proverb, and thus laugh at a plague they cannot cure.

[Illustration:  POVERTY AND JEWELS.]

The Algerine coast has enriched our language with at least two words, respectively warlike and peaceful—­razzia and fantasia.  The latter is applied to a game of horsemanship, used to express joy or to honor a distinguished friend.  A spirited fantasia is organized by the guests of the agha on returning to Akbou.  Twenty of the best-mounted horsemen having gone on before, and being completely lost to sight in the whirlwind of dust created by their departure, all of a sudden reappear.  Menacing their host and his companions like an army, they gallop up, their bornouses flying and their weapons flashing, until at a few paces they discharge their long guns under the bodies of the horses opposite, and take flight like a covey of birds.  Loading as they retire and quickly forming, again they dash to the charge, shouting, galloping, and shooting among the legs of their host’s fine horses:  this sham attack is repeated a score or two of times, up to the door of the agha’s house.  The Bedouins, in their picturesque expression, are making the powder talk.  Finer horsemanship can nowhere be seen.  Their horses, accustomed to the exercise, enter into the game with spirit, and the riders, secure in their castellated saddles, sit with ease as they turn, leap or dance on two feet.  Used, too, from infancy to the society of their mares, they move with them in a degree of unity, vigor and boldness which the English horseman never attains.  The Arab’s love for his horse is not only the pride of the cavalier:  it is an article of faith, and the Prophet comprehended the close unity between his nation and their beasts when he said, “The blessings of this world, up to the day of judgment, shall be suspended to the locks which our horses wear between their eyes.”

[Illustration:  GEORGE CHRISTY IN AFRICA.]

Truly the Oriental idea of hospitality has its advantages—­on the side of the obliged party.  This haughty ruler, on the simple stress of a letter from a French commandant, has made himself our servant and teased his brain for devices to amuse us.  His chief cook precedes us to his birthplace at Chellata, to arrange a sumptuous Arab supper.  After a ride made enervating by the simoom, we descend at the arcaded and galleried Moorish house where Ben-Ali-Cherif was born, and are visited by the sheikh of the college which the agha maintains.  It is a strange, peaceful, cloistered scene, consecrated to study and hospitality.  Chellata, white and silent, sleeps in the gigantic shadow of the rock Tisibert, and in its graveyard, among the tombs of sacred marabouts, walk the small bald-headed students reciting passages of law or of the Koran.  Algeria is dotted over with institutions (zaouias) similar to this, which, like monasteries of old, combine the functions of seminaries and gratuitous inns.  That of Ben-Ali-Cherif, to which he contributes from his own purse a sum equal to sixteen thousand dollars a year, is enshrined in buildings strewn around the resting-place of his holy ancestors.  The sacred koubba (or dome) marking the bones of the marabout is swept by shadows of oak and tamarind trees:  professors stray in the shadow, and the pupils con their tasks on the adjoining tombstones.