Notwithstanding the French occupation, Tunis remains distinctly Oriental. The town is like a veiled woman of the harem wearing a pair of European shoes, incongruous and clumsy. And it is the shoes which the visitor arriving by sea sees first. For the district bordering on the harbor is Italian—an unlovely, odoriferous neighborhood of mean streets lined with squalid hovels where dwell some fifty thousand Sicilians and Maltese, who outnumber the French by more than two to one—while the quarter bisected by the Avenue Jules Ferry is characteristically French, with spacious, tree-planted boulevards, enticing shops, banks, theaters, cinemas, and electric tram-cars. This really imposing thoroughfare, with its fine stores and crowded open-air cafés, might be, indeed, a sort of continuation of the Cannebière in Marseilles interrupted by the Mediterranean. Its principal mercantile establishment, the Petit Louvre, is a creditable imitation of the mammoth Magazins du Louvre in Paris, with which, incidentally, most American women appear to be better acquainted than they are with the palace of the same name on the other side of the Rue de Rivoli. But all this, I repeat, is only that portion of Tunis revealed below the hem of her enveloping Eastern garments. The old Tunis, with its mosques and palaces, its labyrinth of bazaars rising gradually to the _kasbah_, is as Oriental as the Baghdad of Harun-al-Rashid. Most Europeans seem to be under the impression that Tunis is a modern city—modern, at least, in comparison with Carthage. As a matter of fact, however, Tunis (or Thines, as it was originally known) had probably been in existence for some three or four hundred years when the fugitive Dido landed on the shores of the Gulf of Tunis and on the little hill of Byrsa founded Carthage. This view is accepted by no less an authority than the historian Freeman. But for centuries Tunis was overshadowed and eclipsed by the magnificence of her younger sister, sinking to the position of a poor relation, a country cousin, a mere dependency. Yet she had her revenge. Not only has she outlived her haughty neighbor, but she has incorporated her very bones, for there is hardly a column or capital in Tunis which is not of Carthaginian origin. Here, indeed, we see a ghost of Carthage, for the native city must very closely resemble what the commercial quarter of Carthage was five-and-twenty centuries ago. [Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE COUNTRIES OF BARBARY MOROCCO, ALGERIA AND TUNISIA]