“Geo’ge, come wid me,” said Peter the Great one afternoon, with face so solemn that the heart of the young midshipman beat faster as he followed his friend.

 

They were in Ben-Ahmed’s garden at the time—for the middy had been returned to his owner after a night in the common prison, and a threat of much severer treatment if he should ever again venture to lay his infidel hands on one of the faithful.

 

Having led the middy to the familiar summer house, where most of their earnest or important confabulations were held, Peter sat down and groaned.

 

“What’s wrong now?” asked the middy, with anxious looks.

 

“Oh! Geo’ge, eberyt’ing’s wrong,” he replied, flinging himself down on a rustic seat with a reckless air and rolling his eyes horribly. “Eberyt’ing’s wrong. De world’s all wrong togidder—upside down and inside out.”

 

The middy might have laughed at Peter’s expression if he had not been terribly alarmed.

 

“Come, Peter, tell me. Is Hester safe?”

 

“I don’ know, Geo’ge.”

 

“Don’t know! Why d’you keep me in such anxiety? Speak, man, speak! What has happened?”

 

“How kin I speak, Geo’ge, w’en I’s a’most busted wid runnin’ out here to tell you?”

 

The perspiration that stood on Peter’s sable brow, and the heaving of his mighty chest, told eloquently of the pace at which he had been running.

 

“Dis is de way ob it, Geo’ge. I had it all fro’ de lips ob Sally herself, what saw de whole t’ing.” As the narrative which Peter the Great had to tell is rather too long to be related in his own “lingo,” we will set it down in ordinary language.

 

One day while Hester was, as usual, passing her father, and in the very act of dropping the customary supply of food, she observed that one of the slaves had drawn near and was watching her with keen interest. From the slave’s garb and bearing any one at all acquainted with England could have seen at a glance that he was a British seaman, though hard service and severe treatment, with partial starvation, had changed him much. He was in truth the stout sailor-like man who had spoken a few words to Foster the day he landed in Algiers, and who had contemptuously asserted his utter ignorance of gardening.

 

The slaves, we need hardly say, were not permitted to hold intercourse with each other for fear of their combining to form plans of rebellion and escape, but it was beyond the power of their drivers to be perpetually on the alert, so that sometimes they did manage to exchange a word or two without being observed.

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