Bougie—which, because of its trade in wax, is said to have given the French their word for candle—is a place of great antiquity, probably owing its origin to the Carthaginians. Phenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Berbers, Arabs, Spaniards, Turks, and French—it has been occupied by them all in turn, and all have left their impress on its architecture, its customs, or the faces of its inhabitants. Upon the collapse of the Carthaginian power it became a Roman stronghold, and extensive remains of Roman masonry are still to be seen amid the olive-trees. During the reign of En-Nasr, the most powerful of the Berber dynasty of Hammad, it attained a high degree of civilization, being the greatest commercial center on the North African coast. As early as 1068 the heliograph was here in common use: by means of special towers, provided with mirrors, messages were flashed for great distances along the coast. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries rich Genoese and Venetian merchants erected numerous fine buildings in the city, leaving so deep an impress that the place is more Italian than French to-day. Toward the close of the fifteenth century Bougie passed under the dominion of the Hafsides, whose empire extended from Tripolitania to the borders of Morocco, but in the fifteenth century it was seized by the Barbary corsairs, who used it as a base from which to harry the commerce of the Mediterranean. So heavy were the losses inflicted by the corsairs on the sea-trade of Spain that in 1510 Ferdinand V sent a squadron under Don Pedro Navarro to capture Bougie, and Spanish it remained for nearly two score years. The Spaniards built the great citadel that still looks down upon the town, which they succeeded in holding against two attacks by the Barbarossa brothers, only to have it wrested from them in 1555 by Salah Reis, the pirate-pasha of Algiers. Thenceforth until the landing of the French in 1833 the Turkish standard flew over the heights of Bougie, the town, which once boasted one hundred thousand inhabitants, rapidly falling into decay under the blight of Ottoman rule. Forming the background of the rich coastal plain which stretches westward from Bougie is the great Djurjura range, its lofty peaks, some of them nearly a mile and a half in height, inclosing the highland regions known as the Lesser and the Grand Kabylia, with which for grandeur of scenery no other part of Algeria can compare. It is a wild and rugged country, a land of towering, snow-capped mountains and secluded valleys, of overhanging crags and leafy glens, of black forests and bright-blue rivers, of yawning chasms and dizzy precipices and sparkling waterfalls, a bright red village perched on the top of every peak and hill. “If all the artists in the world came to Kabylia,” writes one enthusiastic traveler, “there would be enough subjects to keep them busy for a year.”