The principal approach to the old city is through the Avenue Jules Ferry, a wide and handsome boulevard lined on either side with shops, banks, cafés, and theaters and having a sort of park running down the center. With its broad pavements, its fine trees, its beds of brilliant flowers, and its throngs of promenaders, it is strongly reminiscent of the Rambla in Barcelona. It terminates in the Place de la Résidence, a spacious plaza flanked on one side by the cathedral, a conspicuous building of dubious architectural merit which is the seat of the primate of all Africa, and on the other by the palace of the French resident-general, so that the representatives of church and state directly face each other. The residency is a low, unpretentious building with fine gardens, before whose gilded gates pace sentries in the brilliant uniform of the Garde Beylicale. Forming a continuation of the Avenue Jules Ferry is the shorter and narrower Avenue de France, which terminates at the Bab-el-Bahar, the entrance to the Medina, or old town. Though the Medina was formerly encircled by walls, these have in large part disappeared, leaving the gates of the city isolated, like those of Paris. To pass through the Bab-el-Bahar is to enter another world, to go back into history for a thousand years, to step from the Europe of to-day straight into the Orient of the Middle Ages. I can recall few, if any, places where so abrupt a change takes place within a few paces, where the contrast is so startling. The gate, in itself quite unimposing, opens upon a kaleidoscope of color, a chaos of confusion, a pandemonium of noise. Here wheeled traffic virtually ceases, not because it is forbidden but because it is impracticable by reason of the extremely narrow and densely crowded streets. Here the raucous honk of motor-cars is replaced by the imperative “_Barek balek!_” (take care!) of Arab muleteers. Here, instead of carts and camions, the draft work is performed by files of mangy, moth-eaten camels, as far removed from the graceful _méhari_ of the desert folk as a work-horse is from a thoroughbred; by droves of diminutive donkeys, blue beads festooned around their necks for superstitious reasons, their ears and tails alone visible beneath their enormous burdens; and by brawny porters, twin brothers to the _hamals_ of Turkish cities, who stagger along beneath bales and boxes which would cause an American express-man to go on strike were he asked to handle them, but which they seem to carry with comparatively little effort by means of a rope passed round the forehead, like the tump-line of an Indian guide. I saw one of these fellows, a bare-armed, bare-legged Hercules, walk off quite matter-of-factly with a grand piano on his back.