As becomes a city set on a hill, Constantine is more retentive of its ancient customs than a port like Algiers, which is subject to the levelling influences of the sea and its traffic. Here, for example, the Jewesses retain their distinctive dress. They delight in bright colours, and in heavy barbaric jewellery, such as broad bracelets and large circular earrings. They wear a peculiar head-dress, a sort of lace veil with gold or gilt ornaments, surmounted by a pointed cap. The girls affect a very diminutive form of this cap, generally of brilliant red or blue, stuck jauntily on one side of the head. They are very lovely, these Jewish girls, the finest type of their race, with noble features and clear olive complexions. In point of refinement and the carriage which marks good breeding perhaps no race touches such wide extremes as the Jewish; for some reason or other the Constantine Jews are at the top of the tree. You may sit in a café of the Place de la Brèche and watch the endless pageant of commingled East and West. The military note is predominant; Zouaves and Spahis are everywhere. Behind a series of transport waggons of the Chasseurs d’Afrique a motor-car hoots impatiently. Next a group of little donkeys bearing loads, heads low, and ears wearily flopping. Then carts heavily laden with stone, drawn by five horses,—sometimes a grey team, sometimes a brown,—harnessed in single file, the driver walking by the penultimate horse; a group of neat French children on their way to school; an Arab lady of high degree veiled in the daintiest grey chiffon, riding on a caparisoned mule and holding a lovely child before her; an old Arab seated on a mass of saddle-bags which almost hide his donkey, waggling his feet up and down after the Arab manner, even as civilized man works a salmon-rod; and as you turn to go there comes a troop of men chanting a dull Gregorian measure, and bearing something on a stretcher covered with a green and gold flowered cloth;— an Arab on his way to his last resting-place. Such is a fraction of the cosmopolitan and parti-coloured crowd. And as you watch you will reflect how much it owes to the fact that the natives, high and low,—you do not see much of the former,—wear a distinctive dress. The Arab’s robe is often shabby and often unclean; but it avoids the meanness and vulgarity of European clothes. The working classes of Northern Europe have discarded their suitable dress of the past;—even the lingering smock-frock, most appropriate and dignified of coverings, has gone,—they habit themselves in the cast-off clothings of the well-to-do, or in badly-made imitations of them. The women suffer in appearance more than the men, but both combine in their personal aspect to contribute to the grim squalor and hideousness of our meaner streets.