The dey, secretly admiring the firmness and integrity of Bruce's character, had furnished him with recommendatory letters to the beys of Tunis and Tripoli--states independent of the Dey of Algiers, but over which the circumstances of the times had given him considerable influence. Sailing along the African coast, Bruce landed at Bona, the ancient Aphrodisium, and, anchoring at Biserta, he paid a visit to Utica, as he says, "out of respect to the memory of Cato." He then landed at Tunis, and, delivering his letters to the bey, he obtained permission to visit the country in whatever direction he pleased. From the French and English consuls he received great attention and assistance; and about the middle of September, while the weather was still dreadfully hot, he set out for the interior of the kingdoms of Algiers and Tunis, accompanied by his draughtsman Luigi Balugani, a French renegado named Osman, and ten spahis or foot-soldiers, "who," says Bruce, "were well armed with firelocks and pistols, excellent horsemen, and, as far as I could ever discern, as eminent for cowardice, at least, as they were for horsemanship." On reaching Tucca, he found a Corinthian pillar of Parian marble and the ruins of a temple, among which he remained fifteen days, making various most valuable drawings, which, we are sorry to say, still remain unpublished. After visiting several other places, he came to Hydra, the Thunodrunum of the ancients, on the frontier of the two kingdoms of Algiers and Tunis, and inhabited by a tribe of Arabs called Welled Sidi Boogannim. These Arabs were immensely rich, paying no tribute to Algiers or Tunis--the pretence for this exemption being a very singular one. By the institution of their founder, they are obliged to live upon lion's flesh; and, in consequence of thus eating up the enemies of the state, they are not taxed like the other Arabs. Seated among these wild people, Bruce openly partook of their fare, and, having done so, he acknowledged it in words which are highly characteristic of himself: "Before Dr. Shaw's travels first acquired the celebrity they have maintained ever since, there was a circumstance that very nearly ruined their credit. He had ventured to say in conversation that these Welled Sidi Boogannim were eaters of lions; and this was considered at Oxford, the university where he had studied, as a traveller's license on the part of the doctor. They thought it a subversion of the natural order of things that a man should eat a lion, when it had long passed as almost the peculiar province of the lion to eat man. The doctor flinched under the sagacity and severity of this criticism: he could not deny that the Welled Sidi Boogannim did eat lions, as he had repeatedly said; but he had not yet published his travels, and therefore left it out of his narrative, and only hinted at it in his appendix.