These most ancient of all the devastators which have successively descended upon Barbary are baboons of small size.  They have no tails, that ancestral organ having dwindled to a wart the size of a pea.  This approach to the form of man is aided by another point of personal resemblance—­long whiskers.  That the tail should have been worn off against the rocks, or in climbing the fences to get at orchards and melon-patches, is easily conceivable.  How the evolutionists account for the retention of the beard does not yet appear.  The females carry their young as adroitly and carefully as do the Kabyle women, and ascend the rocks with them with much greater activity.  A young monkey has a less neglected look than a young Kabyle.  His ablutions cannot be less frequent.  Tourists complain that all Kabylia does not boast a single bath-house—­a privation the more striking to one who has to pick his way often for miles among the ruins of Roman aqueducts, tanks and baths, the great basin in cut stone at Djema-Sahridj, which gives name to the place, being a noted example of these works.

[Illustration:  A DISH-FACTORY.]

As the vultures, dogs, negroes, Jews and jackals keep exact memoranda of the market-days, so the baboons are always on hand at harvest.  Ranged in long ranks on an amphitheatre of cliffs, stroking gravely their long white beards like so many reverend episcopi or “on-lookers” confident of their tithes, they calmly contemplate the toilers in the vale below.  Swift was not more certain of his “tithe-pig and mortuary guinea.”  Sunset comes sooner below than above.  The reapers are early home, and the peaks are still purple when the marauders pour down upon the fields, and their share of the work is done with a neatness unsurpassable by reiver, ritter or kateran.  The monkey-tax thus collected is quite a calculable percentage of the crop, and few taxes are more regularly paid.  As it goes to non-producers, its reduction is an object constantly kept in view.  The wretched guns of the natives are, however, but a feeble instrument of reform.  The chassepot may succeed after having finished the rest of its task, and dispose of the baboons after the settlement of the men.  The former, though not incomparably smaller than the French conscript after a protracted war, will never be made to bear arms.  He is therefore useless to modern statesmen, and needs to be got rid of.

While the barn is defrauded by these little vegetarians, the barnyard is laid under tribute by a family of equally unauthorized flesh-eaters—­the panthers.  If this large spotted cat, known in other parts of the world as ounce, jaguar, leopard and chetah, has any choice of diet, it is for veal.  But his appreciation of kid is none the less lively.  Lamb, in season, comes well to him also.  As there are many panthers, each of them of “unbounded stomach,” and they can find little to eat in the way of wild quadrupeds, the destruction they must cause among domestic animals