After a short stoppage at Monastir, where we did not land, we arrived the same afternoon at Mehdia, the once famous “Africa” of the Spaniards, and of the annalist of the Knights of St. John. The town is built on a narrow tongue of land widening towards the centre, stretching out boldly for about a mile into the Mediterranean, and which may be pretty correctly described as a low oval-shaped hill. The isthmus which connects with the coast is barely a quarter of a mile in width, and gives to Mehdia the essential characteristics of a peninsula. In its palmy days the old city evidently covered the whole of Cape Africa, and was surrounded by a thick wall intersected by towers, which protected the isthmus, on one side, and was washed on all others by the sea. Mehdia, according to the doctrines of barbaric warfare, must have been almost impregnable, and so strong were its fortifications that great masses of the _enceinte_ have to this day survived the efforts of the Maltese Knights to entirely destroy them, when they evacuated the place three centuries and a quarter ago. The modern Mehdia immediately adjoins the mainland, and is entered by a gateway through a castellated building known as the Borj Lotani, or “lower fort.” On either side of the Borj Lotani great pieces of the original bastions are still standing, and on the summit of the tower I saw several small cannons made of tarred rope and hoop iron which evidently belonged to the time of its Spanish occupation. The highest portion of the little peninsula is occupied by a quadrangular fortress known as the Borj Fukháni, or “upper fort,” and between these two buildings are the squalid streets of the Arab town, and a long straggling edifice on the sea-shore known as the Jáma Kebira, or great mosque, a portion of which is said to have been once a Christian church. Towards the farther extremity of the cape, there are evident traces of a large basin for galleys or boats hollowed out in the rock, and approached by an opening in the outer bastion. The soil is everywhere catacombed by cisterns, nearly 300 in number, and many of which are of very considerable size. When Commandant Juffé of the 71st Regiment came to Mehdia with a single company of soldiers on the 26th October, he only found a score of half- starved Tunisian artillerymen in the forts, and about the same number of rusty guns resting on the crumbling battlements, which had survived the gradual decay of the wooden carriages that once supported them.