elt greatly drawn towards his new friend.
There was something very pleasing in the young Arab's manner; indeed, in
every sense of the word, he appeared to be a gentleman. Ned, however,
had his duties to perform, and could not just then hold much
conversation with him. Both officers and crew were occupied from
morning till night in attending to the liberated slaves, who had in the
first place to be washed from the filth in which they had lived on board
the dhows; they had then to be fed, and most of them also had to be
clothed, while constant attention was required to keep each gang on the
part of the deck allotted to it. Ned, on inquiring for the dhows, found
that all those captured had been destroyed, with the exception of one,
on board which the Arab crews had been placed, and allowed to go about
their business, as it would have been inconvenient to keep them on board
until they could be earned to Aden or Zanzibar.

The ship was now steering for the Seychelles Islands, the nearest place
at which negroes could be landed without the risk of again being
enslaved. There were upwards of three hundred of these poor creatures
on board, of all tints, from yellow and brown to ebon black. Some few,
chiefly Gallas, were fine-looking people, with nothing of the negro in
their features, and of a dark copper colour; but the greater number,
according to European notions, were excessively ugly specimens of the
human race. Many were in a deplorable condition, having been long
crammed together on the bamboo decks of the dhow, without being even
able to sit upright. Several of the women had infants in their arms,
the poor little creatures being mere living skeletons; not a few of
them, indeed, died as they were being removed from the slavers to the
ship. Most of the slaves, both men and women, looked wretched in the
extreme, for the only food they had received for many weeks was a
handful of rice and half a cocoa-nut full of water. On board two of the
captured dhows not more than three bags of grain were found to feed
between eighty and a hundred people. At first the poor creatures, when
placed on the man-of-war's deck, looked terrified in the extreme, but
the kindness they received from the officers and seamen soon reassured
them. The rough "tars" at all hours of the day might be seen nursing
the babies or tending the sick, lifting those unable to walk from place
to place, or carrying them their food. Not a grumble was heard