Page:The Burton Holmes lectures; (IA burtonholmeslect04holm).pdf/37

 DIVISION OF LABOR

Impatient to explore the streets of both the new and the older city, we find ourselves an hour later on the Boulevard; but an attack on the part of a band of Barbary boot-blacks drives us into the neutral harbor of a popular cafe. Two of the corsairs, nothing daunted, pursue us even here, capture each a single foot, and proceed to apply tan polish to our shoes with as much vigor as their ancestors displayed less than a century ago in applying tan to the hides of our Christian forefathers when by ill chance they were thrown on these shores. The cafe, like all the others, is of the type familiar on the boulevards of Paris, and the aroma of absinthe that permeates the atmosphere proves unmistakably that the Algerian colonist has not lost the love for that unwholesome liquor of which the continental Frenchman is so passionately fond. In fact, so thoroughly Gallic appears this portion of the city that we can scarcely believe the histories that tell us that a little less than fourscore years ago piratical El Jazaïr was as thoroughly Arabic as are to-day Tripoli and Fez. Seventy years has sufficed to these energetic Frenchmen