came a bankrupt, and was rather a humourist, gave an account in my hearing once, though he was a stranger to me, of his ruining a parish by building them a church. He told it with much humour, as a capital stroke upon the bumpkins. First, how he took down the old one, then they were at his mercy; then how he spent all their money, and the church was not half up; then the stormy vestry meetings, one after the other, as they frequently met for new assessments; till at last he would not attend them, but sat on a stile, waiting till all was over; then how men, women, and children pelted him out of the parish, -to which he never returned, and knew not if they had ever finished his job. But should you lose your senses, and take to building, beware how you dispute an account. "I am doubting," said a lady to an architect, "whether I shall do this by contract or not." "Why, ma'am," says the man, smiling, "it makes not the slightest difference to me; I can cheat you either way." If there never was an Act of Parliament through which you might not drive a coach and horses, be sure there never was a contract better than lath and plaster; for either it was lath and plaster in work, or as easily pulled to pieces, and made nothing of. Disputes only make the matter worse. Mr Loudon, who ought to know these matters, thus exposes the impositions to which gentlemen are subject when they come to settle their builder's account: "In these cases, the usual method of proceeding is for each party to call a surveyor, and the two surveyors meet to make out an account of the work done. We will suppose the account they have to settle is a plumber's bill. The first article is 18 cwt. of milled lead. The plumber's survey or requires 25s. per cwt.; the surveyor for the opposite party remonstrates, and points out to him that the prime cost was 15s. The other replies, that 25s. is the customary price, and that he cannot take less. To convince his opponent, he opens an old measuring book, and shows that 25s. has been charged in an account that he settled on behalf of Mr Getall with Mr Easy, the surveyor, some years before; and he again repeats, that it is the custom to charge 25s., and that he cannot deviate from it. In the same way he

charges 1s. per foot for pipe which only cost 4d., and 1s, per lb. for solder that only cost 5d., and so he goes on in the same ratio with all other articles in the bill. After charging so extortionately for the time and mate rials for making a joint to a pipe, he has the conscience to ask, in addition, 2s. 6d. for that joint, though he cannot tell why he does so, except that it is the custom. What can the poor

client do? He finds no redress is to be obtained from the surveyors, and goes to law. We shall see what is the consequence. Plaintiff A, and Defendant B, are at issue upon an account for works executed. The witnesses of A state, that the work is done in a very superior manner. One witness swears that the work is fairly worth L.1544; and another witness, to support him, swears the fair value is L.1630. Then come the defendant's witnesses, who state that the work is very badly executed, and done in a very improper manner. One of them asserts that the outside value of the plaintiff's work is L.930. Now, what are the judge and jury, who know no more about a building account than a boy of seven years old, to do in such a case? They are surprised and astonished that respectable men can be so very wide in their value; and what is the result? Why, they take the several amounts as given in evidence, add them together, and divide the amount by the number of witnesses; accordingly, the result in the above case would be, that a verdict would be given for L.1257 !!!" This is a sketch from nature, evidently, and no very good nature. Yet the witnesses were on oath. Are all trades so infected? Such accounts make one very suspicious. Let us avert the idea for a few moments by going a little further off. I was told the other day, that in America, the United States-I will not be more particular-that is far enough away, at any rate, for us to recover a little confidence at home. Well, in some part of the United States, a certain district was so visited by wild geese, that a man had a cartful of them in no time; and as there every man thinks of making money, off he goes with them in his cart to the nearest town, counting how many dollars he should get; but when he arrived, he found the town so well supplied, that

his article would not sell. In vain he came down in price: no, not at any price could he sell them. What was he to do with them? He couldn't, and wouldn't, take them back, so he offered to give them away. Not a soul would accept one; and he was told, with a hint that was not too civil, that he must be off with them, and not leave them there to infect the

town. This puzzled him. On reflection, however, he thought he knew the propensity of the townsmen; so he promised to be off after he had taken a little rest-so he gets under his cart, and feigns sleep. Then those who would not accept them as a gift, could not resist the opportunity of stealing them-so he returned home with his cart empty. And let us now return home to our peaceful village, out of this far-off dishonest world. And here, Eusebius, a message is just brought me of depredations of a singular nature. Mason Mild's donkey has again broken into our orchard and flower garden. Broken in, did I say?-no, he unfastens the gate; many ways have we fastened it, and to no purpose. Our roses have suffered. The luxurious rascal, washing his face in rose-water, for such the sweet dew has manufactured for him. Now this Mason Mild keeps a cow and a donkey, and has not a perch of land, and he has taught them both to unfasten gates, and turns them loose at nights; the donkey always comes to me, and the cow goes invariably to our neighbour. Half the industry required to teach these creatures their— his, I should say-art, would have enabled the man to get an honest livelihood. I saw a superintendent of some works pay a lot of labourers-they were all in a row-when he came to the bot tom, there stood an Irishman with his hand out; the superintendent looked in his face, and said, "Why, I paid you the first." "Sure and I didn't ax you," said the man, and walked off, not at all doubting his own honesty. There are timid rogues who will not trust their consciences with words. A man who cheated me out of £12 the other day, upon my telling him he was bound in honour to pay me, and that it was

gene

dishonest he did not, replied-no, it was not dishonest, it was only dishonourable. What are we to do with such fellows as that, Eusebius? I know what you would do, even though the compliment on the world's honesty had but just passed your lips; but I must not cut your capers; excuse me. I am, however, having my revenge upon you, for this letter will make you uncomfortable for a week; you will be weighing all the sundry articles that go from the general shop, not those that go to your own house, but you will take your weights and scales to the poorer cottages, and see whether they have been cheated in their bread, and their snuff, and their tea, if such an article as the last is really sold: but China is a great way off, and we are at war just now, and some cunningly dried and curled up leaves may easily take you in. And such" ral shops" have a wonderful power of legerdemain; many go in ash leaves and come out bohea. Will your honest huckster confess it, as the clerk did in his pride of either master-for he was clerk to a dissenting chapel above, and to a wine merchant's vaults belowand in his mysterious consequence he was heard to declare, that he didn't know whether it was owing to one master's preaching, but, to his knowledge, a great deal went in cider into t'other master's vaults and came out wine. Now, do you not fear, my amiable friend, that Foote's satire was not too strong "Have you sanded the sugar?" "Yes, sir." "Have you watered the tobacco ?" "Yes, sir." "Then come to prayers." And now go, and dream away these stern realities in fantastic visions, your delights waking and sleeping, alike dreaming; converse in your elysium with Shakspeare and Eschylus, and take old Montaigne by the sleeve for a freer humour of speculative leisure. Make your own world, and live in it; for if you call this an honest one, and publish your opinion, you are not very fit for it, and of a truth you'll have but a poor chance of living comfortably in it. long as you do, you have my best wishes.- Vive valeque !

Yet as

Ir is somewhat surprising, that after eleven years' possession of Algiers by Europeans, and after so long an intercourse-more or less precarious, it is true-with the inhabitants of Northern Africa, so little accurate information should have been hitherto laid before the public concerning the social condition and internal government of the various tribes which people an. cient Barbary. We have had numerous descriptions of the town of Algiers, and of some other French settlements on the coast; and from the Paris journals the press through out Europe has continually borrowed statements of the progress of the French arms. One of our own most estimable writers and agreeable pocts has given us a series of amusing letters from the former capital of the Dey; and a military author, Sir Granville Temple, has made us acquainted with' some of the more notable features, picturesque and archæological, of the coast. But of the interior of Algeria-of the history and manners of the Kabyles, the Berbers, the Arabs-of the life and actions of that very remarkable man whose instinctive talents, aided by his undaunted courage, has enabled him to keep the forces of France in check for so many years; of all this we have little or no published information upon which we can rely. It is a wonder that, in this book-making age, no unemployed "gentleman about town" has ever thought of paying a visit to the Emir, and of giving to his friends at home one or more volumes on the " Court and Camp of Abd-el-Kader :" and yet the enterprize would not have been more difficult than a visit to the Carlist lines during the late contest in the Basque provinces; nor would the result of such a journey have been a whit less dramatic, or less readable, than a narrative of the comparatively milk-and

water campaigning in which Spanish Dons of the 19th century have shown themselves fond of indulging. We have more than once been tempted to go thither ourselves-(think of that, gentle reader !)-to leave Arthur's Seat for the cloud-capped Atlas, and to compare the silvery beauties of the Forth with the parching expanse of the boundless Sahara: nay more, if we were much provoked thereto, we are capable of periling our person to that extent even now: but en attendant, while Abd-el-Kader is just closing his spring campaign without any dishonour to himself, though he has had two or three towns burnt, and while we have before us some publications from the French capital, which partly supply the want we have complained of, we bottle up our exploratory and martial ardour for another occasion, and resume the more peaceful and prosaic occupation of crabbed critics. (It appears that the journey of Shaw, in 1727, to the interior of Algeria is still the best account we have of the valleys and plains of the lesser and greater Atlas, though more than a century has elapsed since that observant traveller recorded his remarks: for Tripoli, Tunis, Cyrene, &c., we have tolerably good narratives, as far as they go, in Becchey and Müller; while, for Morocco and the north-western coast, the entertaining and lively narrative of Ali Bey, (General Rabia,) has attracted our attention in days of boyhood, and does so still. M. D'Avezac, who is one of the most learned and most extensively read geographers of the present day, and who has made Africa his special study for many years, assures us, in his Sketch of Africa, that we have no other works on which much reliance can be placed, and with us he laments the absence of more detailed and more recent information. With regard to

one particular branch of the subject, he has endeavoured to collect facts himself, and in his account of "Abdel-Kader and his Capital," though too short, has brought forward much curious matter concerning the Emir and his dominions. We shall have occasion to quote from him by-and-by, and shall avail ourselves of his researches, after making due allowance for his national feeling as an enemy of the chief to whom his little work relates.

The history of the conquest of Algiers will have more attention paid to it in future times than it has as yet obtained for that event, however trifling the immediate pretext of it was, will bring about either the formation of a new and independent European power in Africa, or will end in the driving out of the present invaders, and will thus act in a mortal manner on the existence and prosperity of the French nation. Far from proving an easy conquest or a peaceable possession, the attempt to keep Algeria under her dominion, has caused France an immense expenditure of blood and treasure, without as yet producing any but the most insignificant results in a politico-economical sense; and it still forces her to a perpetual exertion of military strength, favourable neither to her own domestic tranquillity nor her public honour. It is not our intention to revert to the circumstances attendant on the overthrow of the Dey, but rather to point out some remarkable features of the present state of things in Algeria, and to show the influence they are producing, or may produce, on France, and Europe in general.

There is a great deal of acute observation to be met with in the Report of Professor Blanqui on Algiers and Constantina, read by him to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences at Paris, in the summer of 1839. The professor is well known in the French literary and scientific world, as a writer on subjects of political economy, as an industrious collector of facts, and as a shrewd commentator on what he observes. He was sent out to Algeria, in the spring of the year just mentioned, by the academy of which he is a member, in order to examine into the social condition of the French colonists, and to

ascertain what was the cause why, with such an extent of country as the French then possessed, and in such a state of security as the treaty of the Tafna was supposed to have gained for them, the affairs of the colony (as it was prematurely called) went on so badly; and why it was that, so far from yielding any return for the vast sums of money it annually cost, the deficit occasioned by the item of "Algiers," in the budget of the minister of war, was perpetually on the increase. M. Blanqui accordingly proceeded to Algiers, and afterwards to Constantina; but he did not visit Oran nor the western part of the French possessions; he made only a very brief stay in Africa, having possibly the same unaccountable dislike, with all his countrymen, to quit Paris and La Belle France, and, after a few weeks, came home again to report progress. He drew up a series of five elaborate papers, in which the number of facts adduced was certainly large compared with the short time in which he had to collect them, if, indeed, he did collect them all on the spot; and, arranging these facts with no small talent and impartiality, he read to the academy a startling, heavy, unexpected exposé of the numerous faults committed on the other side of the Mediterranean, not so much by the military authorities and the troops, as by the civil and judicial authorities, and still more by the middle and lower classes of residents. He condemned loudly the faulty administration of the laws relating to property; the indiscreet manner in which the natives were dealt with; and the profligate way in which the outcasts coming from all countries bordering on the Mediterranean, and huddled together in Algiers as a common asylum, usually conducted themselves. This report had been preceded by a most scandalous trial, in which the conduct of General Bugeaud, now governorgeneral of Algeria, was not less stigmatized than that of Major-general the Marquis de Brossard, who was prosecuted for military mal-practices. That trial had exposed to the public an organized system of bribery and corruption on the part of the highest autho rities in Algeria, at which, even a French public blushed; and, joined to the disclosures of M. Blanqui, produced a disheartening effect, as in