Thence we start for a run of fifty or sixty miles by the seaside road to Algiers, a road which has been splendidly engineered, and is kept for the most part in a condition beyond praise. In front of us stretches the coast-line past the Bay of Algiers to Cap Matifou; on our right are the wooded hills of the Sahel. Here and there the land between the road and the sea is laid out in gardens formed in small rectangular plots divided by hedges of a tall reed to break the force of the wind. Even so the Dutch nurserymen erect screens to protect their tulips on the wind-swept lowlands of Holland. In these enclosures we particularly note frequent plantations of the tall “silver” banana. And so in due time we reach Algiers, conscious of a well-spent day. Travel gives the death-blow to many illusions. If there is one tenet to which British self-complacency has clung with more desperate energy than another, it is that our people are the only successful colonists. We are ready to admit that the German has hardly had a fair chance. He is relegated for the present to desert tropical lands which failed in the past to tempt even Portugal. That France owns colonies of a different class we have been dimly aware, but the oracles of the club and of the Press have consistently pictured to us the French colonist as a miserable being who passes his time sipping absinthe in a café, and longing for his return to _la belle France_. Possibly in the purlieus of Algiers such a being might be discovered; at any rate, he is certainly not more in evidence than the “remittance men” and bar-loafers are in our own colonies. And a motor drive for twenty or thirty miles through the rich plain which encircles Algiers will send our long-cherished belief a-packing to the limbo of dead British prejudices. We have recently discovered that the home-staying French, at any rate, know something about practical gardening, and the raising of vegetable crops for market; that their scientific methods and untiring energy combine to get more out of the ground than we do; and we have even been led to pocket our pride and to import certain practical French gardeners, at a fancy wage, to show us how the thing is done. In this we are only following the example of our ancestors, who acquired most of their arts and crafts from French and Flemish refugees. Yet it was quite a shock when one of these new-comers, looking round him at the fair fields of the home farm on a great estate in a southern county, ingenuously remarked, “But why is not this country cultivated?”