The ancestors of Ben-Ali-Cherif, remotely descended from Mohammed through one of his sisters, were of Kabylian race, and one of them, settled in Chellata, near Akbou, founded there a prosperous college of the Oriental style. Ben-Ali-Cherif, born in Chellata and residing at Akbou, receives the tourist with a natural icy dignity which only a czar among the sovereigns of Europe could hope to equal: those who have but seen Arabs of inferior class can form no notion of the distinction and lofty gravity of the chiefs of a grand house (or of a grand tent, as they are called): the Kabyle noble is quite as superb as the Arab. Ben-Ali seats us at a rich table covered with viands half French and half Oriental: a beautiful youth, his son, resembling a girl with his blue head-drapery and slim white hands, places himself at table, and attracts the conversation of the guest. The young man answers in monosyllables and with his large eyes downcast, and the agha significantly observes, "You will excuse him if he does not answer: he is not used to talk before his father." The host, disposing of the time of his guests, has arranged a series of diversions. The valley of the river Sahel is full of boars, and panthers and monkeys abound in the neighboring spurs of the Zouaouas. While the Roumi are examining his orchards of oranges and pomegranates the agha's courtyard fills with guests, magnificent sheikhs on Barbary horses, armed with inlaid guns. These are all entertained for the night, together with the usual throng of parasites, who choke his doors like the clients of the rich Roman in Horace. At sunrise the party is mounted. The mare of the agha, a graceful creature whose veins form an embroidery over her coat of black satin, is caparisoned with a slender crimson bridle, and a saddle smaller than the Arab saddles and furnished with lighter stirrups. The Christian guests are furnished with veritable arquebuses of the Middle Ages; that is to say, with Kabyle guns, the stock of which, flattened and surmounted with a hammer of flints, is ignited by a wheel-shaped lock, easier to be managed by a Burgundian under Charles the Bold than by an unpretending modern Roumi. The usual features of an Algerian hunt succeed. A phantom-like silence pervades the column of galloping horsemen up to the moment when the boar is beaten up. Then, with a formidable clamor of "_Haou! haou!_" from his pursuers, the tusked monster bursts through the tamarinds and dwarf palms: after a long chase he suddenly stops, and then his form instantly disappears under the gigantic African hounds who leap upon him and hang at his ears. A huntsman dismounts and stabs his shoulder with the yataghan. After a rest the chase is resumed, but this time under the form of a hawking-party.