a week at Algiers with my mistress, and that every time."

This week, the nights with his mistress, the days in a café, with perfumed beard, otto of roses exhaling from his cambric, regaling his ears with the wretched music of a guitar, smoking a hundred pipes of tobacco, and drinking alternately and incessantly coffee and anisette, would be his week of indulgence, luxury and drowsy intoxication, to be succeeded immediately without transition, without a moment's regret, by a week of activity, privation, sufferings, and constant dangers.

Ben Chergui, our Arab, was with difficulty pursuaded to take a pistol; he wished to set out without arms altogether. Two days afterwards the telegraph announced the arrival of our two Zouaves at Blidah, but brought us no news from France. What was all the world about there? What is going on? Heigh ho! this is a weary life here. The other day I heard a native Zouave chaunting this song:

"Oh wind make my compliments to my friends and ask them whither they are gone?

"Whether in Arabia or in Persia, or wherever they may have stopped.

"Tell them I think about them, and leave a thought of me behind with them.

VOL. I.

K

"From all the birds that fly I ask news of you, and not one tells me anything.

"Caress with thy sweetest breath her to whom I have given my heart.

"Oh wind, you go always towards her, and you never return."

This ancient Arab ballad filled me for the whole evening with sadness, and I shut myself up in my room to think of those I love; my mother, my sisters, and one who calls up a souvenir tenderer still. They have no idea in France of the tortures of our life in this place. To be always in the presence of the same faces, of persons whom one esteems and likes, but whose every joke one has heard so many times, is dreadfully monotonous. To be at large and yet in a prison, and whole days without the slightest aliment for thought! To be thus buried alive, close to the world, at a few leagues distance from news; yet to hear none, is, believe me, a very hard lot, that may make the stoutest at times give way to repining. Our physical sufferings are doubtless bad enough; against rain, cold, and snow, hardly a shelter, and alarms keeping us constantly on the alert; but our bodies have been long innured to this; the isolation alone is oppressive beyond description.

The moment's weakness is over. When a storm

mutters thunder in the air, a beneficent rain gives freshness to the earth. From time to time the heart must needs groan a little, but the great work before us, is inspiring enough to rouse it up to renewed energy. Will they ever know in France, how much blood, sweat, and tears, Africa has cost

132

III.

FOUR days after Christmas day the troops were all assembled at three o'clock in the morning on the place d'armes with slung muskets, cartouche pouches at the belt, and in perfect silence. We were about undertaking a razzia by the valley of Ouzera on the northern slopes of the Nador. Thanks to a thick fog and a strong east wind, no enemy's post noticed our march, and the little column, divided into three bands, was able to reach the position agreed upon without molestation. The dawn had not yet appeared; and each of us, crouching with an ear to the ground, listened for the slightest noise indicating human existence. Seeing us thus, one might have taken us for bandits; and indeed there was something of the freebooter, of "Diana's foresters," of "gentlemen of the shade," in the work we had in hand. But war is war, and he and he wages it best who most injures his foe. Our first column having ad

vanced too much to the right, two companies were sent as soon as day broke to surprise some Kabyle huts in the neighbourhood. Their inmates were just beginning to stir out, and one of them holding a torch in his hand, found himself suddenly face to face with one of our soldiers. It is impossible to describe his dismay; the torch fell from his hand, he remained motionless, with open mouth and hanging arms. last he cried out "Roumi! Roumi! Roumi!"* At this cry women, men, children rushed forward precipitately péle mêle, flying towards a wooded ravine on the left of their huts. But their retreat was cut off, and all their cattle fell into our hands.

At

We should only have had to congratulate ourselves on the events of this day, which besides haicks and bournous, of which our men stood in great need, had supplied us with meat in abundance, if we had not had to deplore the loss of M. Ouzarmeau, who was shot by a Kabyle. His tomb is beside that of Colonel Charpenay. M. Ouzarmeau is the first officer we have lost at Medeah; God grant that he may be the last!

*Roumi, foreigners-a corruption of the Latin word Romani.