Monsieur and Madame Bourguignon, the landlord and landlady, were the sole occupants of the hotel. It was impossible, they said: they dared not admit us, as in consequence of a quarrel with the authorities their license had been taken from them. At last our importunity triumphed. On appealing to their humanity in our most pathetic and touching French, they said if we could get a written permission from the _commandant-superieur_ for them to open their hotel, they would do the best they could for us. We had no resource but to beat up the officer's quarters, which, under the conduct of an Arab guide, we soon reached. The servant who answered our summons said, "Monsieur le Commandant was at dinner." Politeness, however, was at this stage of the proceedings out of the question; so we coolly replied that he must leave his dinner and come to speak with a lady. We were not long kept waiting, and were most kindly and pleasantly received, the commandant giving us at once a note to M. Bourguignon requesting him, as a personal favor, to do all he could to make us comfortable, adding, with true French politeness, that he only regretted that in his bachelor quarters he had not himself accommodation to offer us. Thus, one more of our troubles was happily ended, and in a wonderfully short space of time we found ourselves refreshing exhausted Nature with an excellent dinner, waited upon by our jolly landlord, who constantly assured us that we should be very comfortable, "car on mange tres bien a Biskra." It is only on becoming acquainted with scenes and people which we have been in the habit of picturing to ourselves that we realize how feeble a power is the imagination. We found here everything so different from the creations of our fancy. My idea of an oasis, for example, had been a clump of trees, a spring of water and a little verdure. Here we found one several miles in length, and with sixty thousand palm trees, a considerable population, a market and a fort. Biskra is, however, the largest and finest of the group of oases which stud this part of the desert. It is the place of residence of the caid and the chief seat of Arab commerce. By the time we had dined it was already too dark to commence explorations. It was only the next morning, when we rose refreshed and rested, that we began to take in the various details of the new and singular life to which we were being introduced.