Very ancient influences are manifest, too, in the work of the Kabyle silversmiths.  Their diadems, ear-drops, bracelets and anklets remind one of the forms unearthed at Hissarlik and in Cyprus.  In outline and chasing the rectangular, mathematical and monumental rules at the expense of the flowing and floriated.  A certain pre-Phidian stiffness of handling seems to hamper the workman, as though twenty-three hundred years had been lost for him.

[Illustration:  THE BOUDOIR AND KITCHEN.]

That there should be so much of hopeful force left in the Kabyle, artisan, agriculturist or adventurer, is creditable to him, and suggests “an original glory not yet lost.”  He obstinately refuses to accept the sheer professional vagabondism of the Arab, confident, as it were, that the world has in reserve better use for him than that.  “Day-dawn in Africa” will probably gild his hills sooner than the tufted swamps of Guinea or the slimy huts of the Nile.  A class of missionaries quite different from the Livingstones and the Moffatts have devoted themselves to his improvement.  They approach him in a different way, and begin on his commercial and industrial side, not on the spiritual.  The latter does not appear to be by any means so accessible.  Unlike the Ashantees, the Kafirs and the M’pongwe, he was a Christian once, and may become one again.  But he is not going to be evangelized on the hurrah system; and that fact his new rulers, with all their alleged defects as reformers and colonizers, have sense enough to recognize.  The new faith must push its way in the rear of works.  Peace, good government, good roads, better implements and methods of labor will promote the enlightenment necessary to its success.

Bougie, the port of Eastern Kabylia, lying under Cape Carbon, has one Catholic church, standing in the midst of new streets, squares and public constructions indicative of prosperity wrought by the French regime.  It is still in need of easy communication with the interior, having but one road—­one more than in the time of the Turks.  Wax is the chief commodity traversing that line of traffic.  That circumstance has, however, nothing to do with the name of the town.  The name was there when the French came, as was the wax, and very little else but ruins.  If the present state of improvement has been effected with so little aid from good roads, what would not a number of them accomplish?  A railway running to the other end of the province longitudinally through its centre would have but one ridge to overcome, and would find a very fair business ready for it.  The railway and vandalism, in the proverbial sense of the word, could not coexist.  When the Vandals buy railway-tickets and ship fat oxen on fast stock-trains the African world will move.  Nobody ever heard of chronic war between two adjacent railroad-stations, or of a gang of raiders dressed only in shirts and armed with spears and matchlocks going out on the morning mail for a day’s shooting among their fellow-countrymen in the next county.