Mustapha Pacha and his suite arrived at Toulon at seven o’clock this morning, in the “Jeanne d’Arc.” The Bey’s Premier was saluted by fifteen guns. He visited the squadron in the harbour, and breakfasted on board the “Colbert.” Then he returned to the “Jeanne d’Arc,” and was rowed on shore in the admiral’s boat. The Sub-Prefect received him. Mustapha Pacha was dressed in a black coat, with the fez. He wore the Grand Cordon of Nichán, the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and the cordon of the same decoration which has just been conferred on M. Roustan. He left Toulon this evening for Marseilles, Lyons, and Paris. Apartments are engaged for him at the Grand Hotel, where he stays ten days. It is rumoured that he will visit London _incognito_, then return to Paris for a week, and go back to Tunis by way of Bordeaux, Madrid, and Algiers. I must leave Mustapha to distribute his _nicháns_ and _ahads_ with General Musalli’s assistance at the Grand Hotel, and return to the serious side of the war in Tunis. CHAPTER XXIII. HOW THE FRENCH TOOK MATER. The history of the first French expedition to Tunis contains so much diplomacy and so little fighting, that I have decided to give Mater and General Maurand a chapter to themselves. An additional reason for my doing this is my being able to ask somebody else to tell the story. Mr. Thorwald Llewyllen Smith is an Englishman and a farmer. For some years he has cultivated some of the rich pasture-land between Mater and the Gebel Ishkel Lake, and has naturally acquired considerable influence amongst the Arabs of the neighbourhood, whose language he fluently speaks, whose petty disputes he has sometimes settled, and whose bodily ailments he has often cured. Mr. Smith’s white house, cattle-sheds, and trim hedge-rows, standing in the midst of his corn-fields, are all visible from the low hill on which the town of Mater is built. “The Arabs take very little notice of date,” writes Mr. Smith in answer to my appeal to describe the taking of Mater, “and consequently, although they may remember that the French invasion began in the spring-time, during the year of the Flight 1298, they would certainly not be able to say that the 8th of May 1881 was an ill-fated day for the inhabitants of Mater. It was on that day that Sheikh Hmed Ben Yusef of the Algerian clan of the Mukranees, but born and bred on Tunisian territory, came over to Mater from Bizerta as an envoy of the French. I cannot pretend to say what his real instructions were, but it is certain that if he had been specially commissioned to stir up all the mountain tribes of the vicinity to rebellion, he could not have done his work better. The Arabs were already more or less excited and indignant at the way in which Bizerta had been occupied the previous week without a blow being struck in its defence, as well as at the free and easy way in which the French