About the middle of the month the Arabs around Susa, and between Susa and Kairwán, assumed a menacing attitude, and many of the tribes between Tunis and Algeria prepared to rise. To add to the difficulties of the situation the telegraph wires were again and again cut. Although reinforcements continued to arrive, and General Saussier came on the 13th August to study the campaign, now become inevitable, no movement could be executed to check the depredations of the insurgents. Even the very day after the Commander-in-chief’s arrival, and almost in his presence, fifty of the heavily chained convicts, confined in a pestilential dungeon beneath the Goletta fort, contrived to break their fetters, and about dusk rushed into the street. A cry was at once raised that the Bedouins had entered the place; shops and houses were barricaded, and the panic palpably extended to the French officers and soldiers, who, in the cool of the evening, were discussing their absinthe or vermouth before the different cafés. The prisoners, although armed with guns, pistols, and bayonets, hurt no one, and quickly gained the open country. As soon as the alarm subsided, everybody was becomingly valorous after the event, but as the Bey did not wish any French soldiers to join in the pursuit, only a few Arab irregulars, armed apparently with poles and sticks, made a vain and burlesque attempt to capture the fugitives. The Austrian Consul-General, Herr Theodorovich, happened to meet the runaways outside Goletta, and fled precipitately to the French camp near Carthage, bringing the alarming news of the “taking of Goletta by the insurgents.” The soldiers had already been got under arms, when the true state of the case transpired, but it was thought necessary to provide the representative of Austria with a suitable guard to accompany him back to Goletta. This serio-comic incident indicates sufficiently the extent of the insurrectionary movement, even close to the capital itself. The deserters from the Tunisian army seem to have nearly all joined the insurgents threatening Susa, and the Governor, General Bacouch, now acknowledged that his authority outside the town walls was gone. On the evening of the 14th August, a Tripolitan Arab appeared in the streets of Susa with a drawn sword, and with the ominous cry of “_jihad! jihad!_” stabbed to death an unoffending old Maltese tradesman in his own shop. The shouts of the murderer had been echoed by others, and there is no doubt but that the accidental arrival of H.M.S. “Monarch” and the calm presence of mind of Captain Tryon, alone saved the European colony from some terrible disaster. Captain Tryon at once prepared to land his marines, but before this could be done, Sy Muhamed Bacouch had succeeded in restoring order. The assassin was sent to Tunis and subsequently hung.