The villages are immaculately neat and clean; the little white-walled houses rise from blazing gardens whose fragrance fills the air; the fortified farmsteads, built for defense, are cultivated with meticulous care; half a million olive-trees and three times that number of palms cover the island with a sea of verdure; and in the spring, when we were there, the poppies overlaid as with a scarlet mantle the green of the sprouting grain. Barring only central Morocco, I have never seen any country where wild flowers grow in such amazing variety and profusion. During a brief halt while our driver was changing tires Mrs. Powell gathered specimens of twenty different kinds in half as many minutes. In places they were so thickly intermingled that the country-side seemed to be covered with a gorgeous Oriental rug. The islanders are a simple, friendly folk, willing, industrious, and hospitable. They have numerous industries, including sponge-fishing, the making of oil, the manufacture of a kind of white pottery, and the weaving of the silk and woolen tissues known as burnous stuffs, though agriculture is their chief pursuit. There are few evidences of poverty, the inhabitants being, on the whole, extremely prosperous, with quite a sprinkling of men who, according to island standards at least, are wealthy. In dress they are distinctive from their fellows of the mainland, the men wearing the short brown coats of loosely woven homespun which, being characteristic of the island, are called _djerbas_: the short but extremely baggy Cretan trousers, so loose in the seat that it is often used for carrying groceries, chickens, and other objects; the whole being topped off by the jaunty Tunisian _chéchia_ with its long blue tassel. The women, when at work, wear dresses of blue cotton and broad-brimmed hats of braided straw with enormously high crowns, so that, seen from a little distance, they look like Chinese coolies. They are of Berber stock and commonly speak a Berber idiom, though the use of Arabic is rapidly increasing. Curiously enough—for in most things they are tolerant and easy-going—the islanders are Wahabis, the most fanatical of the various sects of Moslems. The Puritans of Islam, they practise a faith of the utmost austerity: they frown on all forms of religious pomp and circumstance; their places of worship are of the simplest character, destitute of all decoration; and they carry their insistence on “the only God” so far as to deny divinity to Mohammed.