The suburb of Mustapha takes its name from the last Dey but three who erected the palace now used as the official summer residence of the Governor. The vast sums he expended on it excited the anger of the janissaries, and led to his disgrace and death. There are many other Arab villas now modernized; they are well described by the artist Fromentin, a painter in words as on canvas: “To-day without exception they belong to Europeans. So the deep mystery which veiled them has vanished, and much of their charm has disappeared. The architecture of these houses has no great meaning when applied to European uses. We must therefore accept them for the pleasure of their exterior aspect, and study them as the graceful monuments of an exiled civilization. Inhabited by the people who built—I might say, dreamed—them, these dwellings were a creation both of poetry and genius. This people knew how to make prisons which were places of delight, and to cloister its women in convents where they were unseen yet seeing. For the day, a multitude of little apertures through stretching gardens of jasmine and vines; for the night, the terraces;—what more malicious, and at the same time more full of care for the distraction of the prisoners? The gardens resemble those playthings which are designed for the amusement of the Arab woman, that singular being whose life, long or short, is never anything but childhood. You see there only little gravelled walks, little rivulets in marble channels, where the water meanders in moving arabesque designs. The baths, too, suggest the invention of a husband at once a poet and a jealous lover. Imagine vast cisterns where the water is not more than three feet in depth, flagged with the finest white marble, and open through vaulted arches to a wide horizon. Not a tree reaches this height; when you are seated in these aerial bathing-places you see only sky and sea, and are seen only by the passing birds. We have no understanding of the mysteries of such an existence. We walk through the country to enjoy it; when we return it is to be indoors. This secluded life near to an open window, this motionless existence before so vast a space, this household luxury, this enervating climate and radiant country, the infinite perspective of the sea—all this must give birth to strange dreams, must throw the vital forces into disorder, and mingle a sentiment beyond the power of words to describe with the sorrows of captivity. But,” concludes our author, “ne me trompe-je pas en prêtant des sensations très littéraires à des êtres qui assurément ne les ont jamais eues?”