Its towering heights crowded with palaces, temples, villas, and triumphal arches, dazzlingly white under the blazing African sun, Constantine must have presented a spectacle of surpassing beauty in Roman times. Yet astonishingly few mementos of its former grandeur remain; for, during the years immediately following the French occupation, the military authorities took no interest in preserving the monuments of the city’s colorful and hectic past, which were ruthlessly destroyed to make way for municipal buildings in the ornate style of the Second Empire, for huge and hideous barracks of red brick, for a whole system of streets and parks and plazas, and for the railway. The greatest vandalism was the destruction of the magnificent triumphal arch erected by one of the Roman emperors; but temples, colonnades, and baths were all swept away by the army engineers in their mania for “modern improvements.” Even the splendid bridge, built during the reign of Constantine, which stood intact until 1857, when two of its arches fell, instead of being restored was battered down by artillery and replaced with a hideous structure of iron. A curious commentary on our boasted modern civilization, is it not, that seventy-five years of peace have destroyed wantonly what was spared by two thousand years of warfare? Of the public buildings, the most noteworthy is the palace built about 1830 by Ahmed Pasha, the last of the beys, which is one of the finest examples of modern Moorish architecture in existence. In its construction the Turks followed their customary method of tearing down other buildings in order to obtain fine old tiles and beautiful carvings, and by looting the Roman ruins which dot the country-side of their columns, capitals, and marbles. Its exterior, as in the case of so many Oriental buildings, is gloomy and forbidding, but within is a series of sun-drenched courtyards, flagged with marble, filled with orange and lemon trees, and surrounded by cloisters, their carven arches supported by fluted columns in porphyry of many colors, where the bey and his concubines were wont to pass the heat of the day. On the walls of the cloisters which border the central patio, is a series of naïve and crudely executed paintings of land battles and naval engagements, in which, of course, the Turks are depicted as uniformly victorious. They are said to be the work of an Italian shoemaker who, taken prisoner by the Barbary corsairs, painted them as the price of his freedom. Mellowed by time, the general effect of the pictures is not unpleasing, but it is to be hoped that upon his release the cobbler-artist stuck to shoemaking.