ad to sew my head on again, were your highness
pleased to honour me by cutting it off."

"Be gone, caitiff," said the Dey, with a slight smile.

Baba vanished without further reply.

Meanwhile Sidi Omar left the palace and directed his steps to his own
quarters, which stood on the little fortified island in front of
Algiers. This islet, having been connected with the mainland by a pier
or neck of masonry about a hundred yards long, formed the insignificant
harbour which gave shelter to the navy of small craft owned by the
pirates. At the present day the French have constructed there a
magnificent harbour, of which that now referred to is a mere corner in
the vicinity of the old light-house. Although small, the port was well
fortified, and as the Minister of Marine descended towards it, his eye
glanced with approval over the double and treble tiers of guns which
frowned from its seaward battlements. In passing over the connecting
pier, Sidi Omar paused to observe a gang of slaves at work repairing
some of the buildings which covered the pier stretching from the
mainland to the island.

Although slaves, they were not of the black colour or thick-lipped,
flat-nosed aspect which we are apt to associate with the name of slave.
They were, indeed, burnt to the deepest brown, and many of them also
blistered, by the sun, but they were all "white men," and contemptuously
styled, by their Mohammedan task-masters, Christians. The pier on which
they wrought had been constructed long before by thirty thousand such
slaves; and the Algerine pirates, for above three centuries previous to
that, had expended the lives of hundreds of thousands of them in the
building of their fortifications and other public works; in the
cultivation of their fields and gardens, and in the labours of their
domestic drudgery.

Some of the slaves thus observed by the Minister of Marine had been
sailors and merchants and mechanics, military and naval officers,
clerks, scholars, and other gentlefolks from Italy, Portugal, America,
and all the lands which chanced to be "at war" with his highness the
Dey. Formerly there had been hosts of English, French, Spanish,
etcetera, but their governments having bowed their heads, opened their
purses, and sent consuls to the piratical city, they were now graciously
exempted from thraldom. It was hardish work for men accustomed to
cooler climates to be obliged, in the sunshine of an African summer, to
harness th