home! I gazed eagerly round at the small rooms with their bare, whitewashed walls, and then--when I had a box to sit on--I sat down and cried. “Nice place, Algeria, isn’t it?” mildly remarked my husband. I felt at that moment as though I could have throttled him cheerfully. [Illustration: A VIEW OF TENIET-EL-HAAD. _From a Photograph._] Truly my position was not enviable. Accustomed hitherto to be waited on hand and foot, I now found myself without a servant of any kind, save my husband’s orderly. I was in a strange country, and was expected to do everything for myself. However, repining would not help matters, so I set to work to teach the orderly the rudiments of the culinary art, he knowing nothing more about it than--than I did. What hard days those were, to be sure! I wonder my husband survived them. My fried potatoes fell into greasy bits instead of frying, my scrambled eggs flew up the chimney, my omelettes were sickening messes, and the meat either would not cook at all or exaggerated the matter and turned into coal. Then there was the washing and ironing. I never thought--until I essayed the work--that there was much difficulty about it; it seemed quite easy. You took soiled things off, put them in water and soaped them; then you wrung them out, ironed them, and there you were. Our linen, however, grew greyer and greyer, yellower and yellower, and I became pensive. “What _do_ you think is wrong with it?” I asked the orderly, who had become our washerman, there being no other. “Well, madam,” he said, diffidently, “I think it wants sort of boiling gently with something or other. I remember my mother----” “Oh, what did your mother do?” I asked, eagerly. “Well, she washed it first, and then put it in a barrel with a hole in the bottom and--and boiled it, I think. Leastways, it was somehow all right after.” “But you can’t boil in a barrel; it would catch fire,” I objected. “And why a hole? Surely the water would run out?” He looked shy and unhappy. “Well, there may be something wrong about the boiling in the wooden barrel. I misremember that, but”--a slow grin spread over his face--“I’m sure about the hole, because I used to stop it up, and mother was awfully wild.” After some weeks, however, the orderly began to see light, and, helped by an Arab boy, managed these tiresome domestic matters well enough to allow of my going out riding and seeing a little of the country.