at he has come off sadly worsted in the war of life."

"You are quite right," said Harry Blount; "but I hope that your hardest
battles in that war are now over. Our masters have promised to carry us
to some place where we may be ransomed by our countrymen, and you of
course will be taken along with us."

"Do not flatter yourselves with that hope," said Jim. "_I_ was amused
with it for several years. Every master I have had gave me the same
promise, and here I am yet. I did think when my late owners were saving
the stones from the wreck, that I could get them to enter the walls of
some seaport town, and that possibly they might take me along with them.
But that hope has proved as delusive as all others I have entertained
since shipwrecked on the shore of this accursed country. I believe there
are a few who are fortunate enough to regain their liberty; but the
majority of sailors cast away on the Saaeran coast never have the good
fortune to get away from it. They die under the hardships and
ill-treatment to which they are exposed upon the desert--without leaving
a trace of their existence any more than the dogs or camels belonging to
their common masters.

"You have asked me to give an account of my life since I have been
shipwrecked. I cannot do that; but I shall give you an easy rule by
which you may know all about it. We will suppose you have all been three
months in the Saaera, and Bill here says that I have been here ten years;
therefore I have experienced about forty times as long a period of
slavery as one of yourselves. Now, multiply the sum total of your
sufferings by forty, and you will have some idea of what I have
undergone.

"You have probably witnessed some scenes of heartless cruelty--scenes
that shocked and wounded the most sensitive feelings of your nature. I
have witnessed forty times as many. While suffering the agonies of
thirst and hunger, you may have prayed for death as a relief to your
anguish. Where such have been your circumstances once, they have been
mine for forty times.

"You may have had some bright hopes of escaping, and once more
revisiting your native land; and then have experienced the bitterness of
disappointment. In this way I have suffered forty times as much as any
one of you."

Sailor Bill and the young gentlemen,--who had been for several days
under the pleasant hallucination that they were on the high road to
freedom,--were again awakened to a true sense of their situation