A perambulation of the town of Algiers removes much of the impression of its over-modernization which is received on landing. The boulevards facing the sea and the streets immediately behind them are all new, but where the hill begins to rise steeply the traveller will pass at a step from the French city to the old Arab town. A greater contrast could not be imagined. The French love broad streets, lofty houses, big windows, open spaces, and above all straight lines. The Arab town is a labyrinth of narrow lanes, twisting and curling according to no sort of plan, in fact to all appearance so inextricably confused and so full of blind alleys that one might suppose no living man capable of mastering their meanderings. But a stranger need be under no apprehension of being lost. He has only to keep ascending to reach the Kasbeh, the old Turkish fort at the top of the town, or descending, a course which sooner or later will bring him back to civilization. The lanes are very narrow, in many cases only just wide enough to permit a horseman to pass a foot-passenger; and as a rule the first floors of the houses, supported on diagonal cedar poles, in themselves an interesting and picturesque feature, extend over the footways, and almost meet. In many cases the road is completely vaulted. Beyond the general suggestion of ancientry there is really little in this old town to engage the attention of the stranger; a few charming marble doorways of conventional Arab design; an occasional glimpse of a colonnaded court-yard within; that is all. Writers on Algiers have strained their vocabularies in frenzied efforts to make something of this curious maze of dwellings; to produce any effect they have generally had to fall back on their imagination of what is happening behind those locked portals and those heavily barred windows; of that life of the Orient of which we know and comprehend nothing. Perhaps there is nothing very extraordinary to be known. The sombre, tyrannical master and husband, the infantile and enslaved wife,— that is our general impression of the Oriental _ménage_. Yet even Arab wives are not dumb animals, and all men that are born of women are born to be henpecked. Perhaps even here _les paroles de l’oreiller_ have their force, and it may be that the stately lord sometimes meets his match. “From a vixen wife protect us well; Save us, O God! from the pains of hell,” says The Gulistān. The conventional sternness of the husband’s control suggests a sense of his own weakness. It certainly confesses a curious diffidence as to his own charms, perhaps with reason, for, says an Arab proverb, “Quand la femme a vu l’hôte, elle ne veut plus de son mari.” So even if the Western idea of Mohammedan domestic tyranny is correct (I am far from believing that it is), we may at least console ourselves with the hope that the wife sometimes has as much of her own way as is good for her. [Illustration: ALGIERS: DOORWAY, RUE MEDEA]