In the Sahara special companies have been recently raised. They contain a certain admixture of French troops:—24 officers and 123 men to 817 men. It would seem a special field for the raising of a force of natural cavalry and camel-men. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _X—TIMGAD_ The Roman frontier—Lambessa—The Empire ruined by bad finance—African Emperors—The plan of Timgad—Buildings, inscriptions, and mosaics— Prosperity of Roman Africa—Local patriotism—The Roman tradition. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ “As in those realms where Cæsars once bore sway, Defaced by time and tottering to decay, There in the ruin heedless of the dead, The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed.” GOLDSMITH. East and west of Batna lay the Roman frontier line during the first two centuries of the Empire. It was marked by a series of cities, partly military, partly commercial; extensive ruins bespeak their ancient importance. As elsewhere in Europe and North Africa the fall of the Empire seldom meant the abandonment of the city sites; they continued to be occupied by successive generations of men, even though, like Rome herself, for a period they sank to insignificance. And their ruined buildings, public and private, offered a convenient quarry to the builders of subsequent ages. It results that we are scarcely able to find an ancient city in which the original plan of house and street has not been seriously interfered with. While, as in many English towns, the main lines of the streets often follow the Roman thoroughfares, we have seldom the opportunity of studying the scheme as a whole, although all through Southern and Western Europe innumerable individual features exist more or less well preserved.