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 port of Oran, halting at Hammam Rirha, where a huge hotel has been built to accommodate the prospective visitors to the hot springs of the region. Our destination, however, is not Oran, which is a modern and uninteresting town, but Tlemçen, once the proud capital of a Moorish kingdom, a rival to the kingdoms of Fez and of Granada.

CONVALESCENT

But even Tlemçen already shows the impress of her French masters, and her structures form a motley ensemble of crude and semi-European buildings, with here and there the remains of a Moorish arch, or a fragment of Arabic tracery. Splendid, indeed, must have been the Tlemçen of the Middle Ages, when within her walls there lived a population of a hundred thousand. One of the daintiest bits of old Tlemçen may be found in all its picturesque decay near the