ACCIDENT often determines the course of a man's life. The greater part of human actions, however humiliating to our moral and intellectual dignity, is the result of sheer accident. That the accidents of life should harmonize with the immutable decrees of Providence, is the great mystery of an honest and thinking mind. The reading accidentally of a fugitive _brochure_, thrown upon the table of the public library of Algiers, gave me the germ of the idea, which, fructifying and expanding, ultimately led me to the design of visiting and exploring the celebrated Oasis of Ghadames, planted far-away amidst the most appalling desolations of the Great Saharan Wilderness. This should teach us to lower our pretensions, and take a large discount from our merits in originating our various enterprises; but, alas! our over-weening self-love always manages to get the better of us. The _brochure_ alluded to was a number of the _Revue de L'Orient_, published at Paris, containing a notice of Ghadames by M. Subtil, the notorious sulphur[6]-explorer and adventurer of Tripoli. On leaving Algiers, in January, 1845, I carried the idea of Ghadames with me to Tunis; and thence, after agitating an exploration to The Desert amongst my friends, some of whom plainly told me, if I went I should never return, I should be consumed with the sun and fever, or murdered by the natives, and to attempt such a thing was altogether madness, I journeyed on to Tripoli, where I entered with all my soul and might into the undertaking. But as in Tunis so in Tripoli, I heard the birds of evil-omen uttering the same mournful notes of discouragement:--"I should never reach Ghadames, no one else had done so, or no one else had gone and returned. I should perish by the hand of banditti, or sink under the burning heat. I was not the man; it required a frame of iron. Enthusiasm was very well in its way, but it required a man who was expert in arms, and who could fight his way through The Desert." And such is the absurd character of men, and some people pretending to be friends of African discovery, that, on hearing of my safe return after nine months' absence, they felt chagrined their sagacious vaticinations were not verified. Like a man who writes a book, and ever so bad a book, he cannot afterwards adopt a right sentiment, or course of action, because he has written his book. It is true, the fate of Davidson, in Western Barbary, and the late disastrous mishap of the young Tuscan on his return from Mourzuk, favoured the pretensions of these Barbary-coast prophets, who cannot comprehend a deviation from what had happened before, but it is equally true that the violent deaths of these individuals, so far as we can gather from the details, were brought about by the greatest possible imprudence on their part. However, I may say without hesitation, no people dread The Desert so much, and have in them so little of the spirit of enterprise and African discovery, as the naturalized Europeans of