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Many of the native garments are made in Tlemcen. The town has long been noted for its fine workmanship, its lace, hats, shawls, and blankets being famous. Among other garments are some made for the Jews, especially the bright red shawls which they use here for mourning.

The Tlemcen of to-day is composed largely of new French buildings. The streets are French streets. There is a square in the centre of the town where the people meet to walk about, and there is a park outside it, filled with great plane trees and wild olive trees, which is known as Tlemçen's Bois de Boulogne.

On my way here I stopped at Sidi Bel Abbes, a rapidly growing French settlement named after a Mohammedan saint. It still has its Arab quarter. The city is built in the shape of a rectangle with great walls about it, and like most of these Algerian towns has a military quarter inhabited by several companies of the foreign soldiers employed by the French to garrison Algeria. The troops are composed of such riff-raff from Europe as can be enlisted at a few cents a day.

In this hidden corner of Africa the Europeanized little town of Sidi Bel Abbes has its regular concerts by the military band, a theatre, and also a “Café Chantant," where the songs and dances are even more wicked than those of Paris itself. Indeed, things are moving fast in this French section of the African continent.

CHAPTER IX

THE TELL AND ITS FARMS

HE French have done good work in colonizing
Algeria, and have greatly increased its value

T

as a farming country. The colonization depart

ment has laid out new towns and farm sites. Some of the lands are given away and others sold at auction on long time. There are agricultural banks for the benefit of the farmers and special inducements to settlers in low steamship and railroad rates.

There are eight hundred thousand Europeans settled in Algeria. More than half of these are French, but there are also many Spaniards, Italians, and people from Malta, Sicily, and other islands of the Mediterranean Sea. Already about one seventh of the whole population is of European origin and the best lands of the country are being rapidly bought of the Mohammedans by these invading Christians. The European population has doubled within thirty years.

The cities are growing. There are French towns all over the country and the Christian element is everywhere in control. Perregaux, where I am writing, contains more than five thousand European inhabitants and has all the surroundings of a rural city of France. Its streets are wide and well shaded and it has a large public garden in which the band plays several times a week. Its stores are like those of France and it has no end of cafés and restau

[graphic]

The gentlemen of Tlemçen take great pride in their costly high hats made

of straw here in their own home town.

[graphic]

One of the seventy mosques of Tlemçen was erected by the Sultan to the popular confectioner who taught his three sons. For killing this candy saint, the wicked Grand Vizier was thrown into a vat of cement.

rants. There are scores of other such cities throughout the Tell, many of which, like Blidah, Tlemçen, and Orleansville, are populous and prosperous.

The Tell of northern Africa has been noted for many generations as one of the granaries of the world. It fed Carthage from the time when it was founded by Queen Dido, eight or nine hundred years before Christ. It was the bread land of Rome in the days of her glory, and the Arabs and Moors grew fat upon it for centuries before the French came. It comprises the valleys between the mountains running along the coast and the high plateaus of the Atlas which fall away into the Sahara, as well as a rich coastal strip here and there. It runs clear across Algeria and Tunisia, and, in round numbers, is seven or eight hundred miles long from west to east and from thirty to one hundred miles wide. It contains altogether an area almost as large as New England and fully as large as the state of Illinois. It has between thirty-five and fifty million acres of excellent lands, but this is in patches, some large and some small. I have gone through regions such as Oran, where the soil is as rich as the Mississippi Valley, and through others where the vineyards grow in a fat, red loam, like that of the best coffee plantations of São Paulo, Brazil.

As it is now winter, only the stubble is left on the great grain fields, but there are strawstacks dotting the landscape everywhere and the trains are loaded with wheat and other cereals. The wheat is handled in four-bushel bags piled high on freight cars and then covered with tarpaulins. The straw is carefully saved, for it is the chief stock food, "long feed," as some of our farmers would call it. The stacks are covered with a thatch as carefully put

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