There have been no aspirations to make of it a comprehensive guide-book or survey of the country’s long history, neither has any attempt been made to criticize the French rule, or to compare it with the administration of other colonies. True facts have been set down as seen by one who has lived many years in the country, constantly studying all about him without confining himself to one area nor to one class of people. Living not only in the big cities, but also in the cultivated plains, in the desolation of the desert, and mixing with the French administrators, with business men, with the colonists, and visiting the Arabs in such intimacy that it is possible to tell of their daily life as it is really lived. [Illustration: map] It is more a pen-picture of Algeria and the Sahara as it is to-day, drawn in the desire that the reader— be he traveler in all the senses of the word or one who journeys by his fireside on long winter evenings— will close the volume with a feeling that he has peeped for a moment into the intimate life of a country which, with all its youthful future, has a background of history more varied perhaps than any other country in the world. . . . To the average tourist who leaves the misty London station in search of warmth and sunshine, the country he is about to visit is probably a somewhat uncertain vision of blue skies, palm-trees, and stately Arabs. The inspired artists of the P. L. M. railway posters have dazzled his eyes with enchanting prospects of palm-green shores and rolling expanses of sand, golden in a perpetual sunset, while the scaleless maps of tourist agencies have graven in his mind the names Algiers, Biskra, Fez and Tunis, leaving him with a vague impression that all these places are in the same country and within easy reach of one another. His mind is rather in the same state as that of the old lady who asks the officer going to India not to forget to look up her nephew who is stationed in Burmah. He has probably not realized that Algeria differs greatly from Tunisia and Morocco in people and in government, and that it has no connections whatever with either of these two countries which form its eastern and western frontiers.