Lippincotts Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 | Page 7

small snake, broken glass and nails. The spectator was in the midst of these enthusiasts, being touched by them in their antics, yet he could detect no foul play, except that he imagined the sword in the first-named experiment to have been driven into an old wound or between the skin and the flesh. It was to counteract the influence of the fire-eating marabouts that the French government sent over Robert Houdin, the ingenious mechanician, but though he eclipsed their wonders by tricks of electricity and sleight, he has left but a lame explanation of the "juggleries" of the Algerine saints.
[Illustration: THE GREAT MOSQUE, CONSTANTINA.]
The worst attribute of these khouans is, that after having excited the ignorant Kabyles to many a losing war by their magnetism, they remain themselves behind the curtain, safe and sarcastic.
In the Moorish quarter of Constantina, where the streets are about five feet wide, you sit down to watch the perpetual come-and-go of the inhabitants. Taking a cup of fragrant coffee--which, as the reader knows, is in Eastern countries eaten at the same time that it is drunk--you sit on a stone bench of the coffee-house and contemplate mules, horses, asses, passengers, buyers, sellers, loungers, Arabs, Turks, Kabyles, Jews, Moors and spahis. On every side you hear the cry of "Balek! balek!" This means "Look out!" and the word is closely followed by the causative fact. The street is unpaved, the horse is unshod, the hoofs cannot be heard, and you have hardly time to efface yourself against a wall when a cavalier passes by like a careless torrent, scattering the white bornouses centrifugally from his pathway as he advances. The streets, as we observed, are very narrow. Each has its own manufacture. Here are the tailors; here, in this deafening alley, are the blacksmiths; farther on are the shoemakers, and you are driven mad with wonder at the quantities of slippers made for a people which goes eternally barefoot. Springing out of this d?dal intricacy of booths and workshops rise the slender minarets of prayer, of which the principal one belongs to a mosque said to be the most beautiful in Algeria. The interior of this chief mosque is not deprived of ornament, having its columns of pink marble, its elliptical Moorish arches, and its tiles of painted fayence set in the walls. In the centre is the pulpit, coarsely painted red and blue, where the imaum recites his prayers. Three small, lofty windows are filled with carved lacework. The floor is spread with carpets for the knees of the rich, with matting for the poor. Over all rises the square, crescent-crowned minaret--no belfry, but a steeple where the chimes are rung by the human voice. Night and day, from the heights of their slender towers, the muezzins toll out their vibrating notes like a bell, inviting the faithful to prayers with the often-heard signal: "Allah ill' Allah: Mohammed resoul Allah!"
[TO BE CONTINUED.]

THE NATIONAL TRANS-ALLEGHANY WATER-WAY.
[Illustration: VIEW OF NEW RIVER.]
The offices of running water have afforded a fertile theme for the poet and the philosopher. In the ruder ages of the world the water-ways which carve their course over the face of the globe were regarded only in the light of natural barriers against hostile invasion; and thus arose the historic principle--
Lands intersected by a narrow frith Abhor each other.
But civilization has demonstrated that they subserve a much higher purpose, that the rivers of a country are its great arteries and highways of trade, and that they fulfill functions as numerous and benign in the political economy as in the physical geography of the regions they furrow. In the Old World, the advancing streams of culture, science and commerce, and even the migrations of nations, have ebbed and flowed along the classic valleys of the Rhine, the Rhone and the Danube; and the banks of the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile are rich in memories of the world's mightiest and most splendid empires. In America the fertile watersheds of the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri are fast becoming what their antitypes of the great continent have been in the past. The outspreading wave of civilization and population has already reached westward to the foot of the Rocky Mountains from the Gulf of Mexico to Montana and Idaho, while even the basin of the Columbia River is rapidly filling up with an active, thriving and busy people, who can smile at the poet's vision:
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound Save its own dashings.
The water-courses of a country are not less valuable to it than the little Pactolus was to the ancient city of Sardis, through whose streets it ran freighted with gold. But these natural highways of human intercourse, like most of Nature's provisions, are capable of indefinite artificial extension and multiplication.