I might add, parenthetically, that the _mihrab_, in a more or less conventionalized form, appears in the patterns of nearly all Oriental prayer-rugs, which are spread upon the ground so that the apex of the design points meticulously toward Mecca. The status of Tlemcen as a holy city, which still draws pilgrims not only from North Africa but from all parts of the Moslem world, is due to its association with the highly venerated Moorish saint, Sidi Bou Medine, who was born at Seville in 1126, wandered through the Mediterranean lands effecting cures and performing reputed miracles, was summoned to Tlemcen to stand trial on a charge of heresy, and died within sight of its gates, expressing with his last breath the wish that he be buried there. So his faithful followers laid him to rest on a lovely hillside near the little hamlet of El Eubbad, a mile outside the city, and beside the _koubba_ which covers his grave they raised a mosque of incomparable beauty, one of the finest specimens of Moorish architecture in the whole world of Islam. Its columns are of many-colored marbles, and stucco lace-work so delicate that it might have been made under a magnifying-glass covers the arches which spring upward to the roof. The lofty portals are incased with ancient Moorish tiles of the lost luster, and the cedar-wood doors, covered with an intricately interlaced pattern in bronze, are said to rival those designed by Ghiberti for the Baptistery in Florence. A mile and a half to the west of Tlemcen, without the gate which looks toward Fez, are the extremely picturesque ruins of Mansoura, a mushroom city of amazing beauty, solidity, and grandeur, which was built almost overnight by the Emir Abou Yakoub, sultan of Fez, while engaged in the siege of Tlemcen. The siege lasted eight years, and the sultan, who was of a luxury-loving disposition, turned his camp into a walled city covering two hundred and fifty acres, complete with the palaces, mosques, baths, barracks, and other buildings of an imperial residence. He named it El Mansoura, “the victorious,” but in this he was somewhat premature, for he was eventually compelled to raise the siege, though Tlemcen was taken some years later by his successor, Ali V, the Black Sultan, whereupon Mansoura was abandoned for good and all. Besides the forty-foot walls, and the massive towers, and the minaret, which is more than six score feet in height and one of the finest in existence, but little remains of this all-of-a-sudden city which was born on a monarch’s whim. But such portions as are still standing are very beautiful. Mellowed by time and weather to a glorious shade of pinkish brown, they rise in lonely grandeur above the almond-orchards, which, in the springtime, turn the hill-slopes on which Mansoura sits into a sea of blossomed snow. * * * * *