plant that adds an effective touch of color to many a whitewashed Moorish wall is the Bougainvillea, a creeper whose crimson foliage has the appearance of a mass of brilliant flowers. The grape vine has in latter years become an Algerian staple. Great

pains have been taken to exclude from the province the phylloxera plague that has taken millions from the pockets of French wine growers. At the custom house of Algiers nothing is so rigorously sought out and confiscated as any green thing in which the dreaded parasite might lurk. With this protection vineyards have multiplied, and vin du Sahel is a sign seen in many cafes.

The Sahel, it should be explained, is the isolated table land that drops down to the shore of the Bay of Algiers, and on whose northern slope the city lies. It is a tract of rolling hill and dale, closely cultivated with such crops as will flourish in its scantily watered soil—for it has no brooks that do not dry up in the summer—dotted with villages more or less picturesque, and intersected by smooth French roads and narrow, winding Arab byways. At its highest point, twelve hundred feet above the sea, near the hamlet of Bouzareah, stands the imposing Fort l'Empereur—named not after Napoleon, but after Charles V of Germany and Spain, who encamped there during his fruitless invasion of Algiers in 1541.

A few miles to the southward the Sahel sinks abruptly to a wide, level valley that divides it from a lofty range running east and west, an offshoot of the Little Atlas Mountains. Through these there are long, narrow defiles that lead to the desert beyond. One of them, the Ruisseau des Singes, opposite the village of Chiffah, is known to the tourists, who penetrate to a tiny French inn that lies two or three miles above its mouth, and is surrounded by dense woods that are plentifully inhabited by apes.