The principal state apartments of the Bardo are the Throne Room, the Hall of Justice, and the Salle des Glaces, so named, I suppose, from its mammoth crystal chandeliers. The last named is just such a room as may be found in almost any European palace, the walls lined with life-size paintings of Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, Victor Emmanuel of Italy—the first of the name, I mean—an incredibly ugly man with a pug-nose and enormous mustachios, Francis Joseph as a youth in a white uniform so tight at the waist as to suggest the use of corsets, and, of course, a whole portrait-gallery of the beys who have reigned in Tunisia ever since the Cretan adventurer, Hussein ben Ali, made himself master of the country at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The pictures of the present bey, Sidi Mohamed el Habib, and of his immediate predecessor on the throne, Sidi Mohamed En Naceur Bacha, show dignified, intelligent, amiable looking men; but the earlier rulers, with their fierce, dark faces, glowering from beneath enormous turbans, suggest the pirates that they were. Adjoining the state apartments, in the rooms formerly occupied by the women of the royal harem, has been gathered a remarkable collection of antiquities and of Moorish and Arabic work under the name of the Musée Alaoui. As this is not intended to be a guide-book to Tunis, I have no intention of trespassing on the field of Herr Baedeker and Messrs. Thomas Cook & Son by enumerating the many beautiful and interesting objects—sculptures, faiences, arms, glassware, terra-cotta—which the museum contains, though passing mention should be made of its collection of ancient mosaics, which is one of the finest in existence. Occupying nearly half of the floor of the great hall, an apartment sixty feet in length, is an enormous mosaic in almost perfect preservation, “The Triumph of Neptune,” found at Sousse; while set in the walls are mosaics brought from various other parts of the regency—pagan mosaics from Zaghouan; representations of a circus from Gafsa; a mosaic unearthed at Tabarca depicting a Roman farm; and numerous other scenes. From these the visitor possessed of a little imagination can obtain a very graphic conception of the domestic life, recreations, and religious observances of North Africa under the Romans. What a pity, I thought, that these mosaics cannot be seen by the youth who is struggling with high school and college Latin! Then he would realize that the ancients were not the unreal, stilted figures portrayed in our dry-as-dust text-books, but that they lived and loved and fought and played games and went to circuses very much as we do, the chief difference being that they wore togas instead of trousers and shouted, “To the lions with the Christians!” instead of, “Kill the umpire!” But one of these days, perhaps, we shall teach Latin more intelligently. [Illustration: A GATE TO BARBARY