ladies.

They drank hard and lengthily in toasts to "The ladies of Algiers" and
"The freedom of Montenegro!"

Outside, upon the terrace, heaved the sea, and its rollers slapped the
strand in the darkness with much the sound of wet sails flapping. The
air was warm, and the sky full of stars.

In the plane-trees a nightingale was piping.

It was Tartarin who paid the piper.

X. "Tell me your father's name, and I will tell you the name of that
flower."

PRINCES of Montenegro are the ones to find the love-bird.

On the morrow early after this evening at the Platanes, Prince Gregory
was in the Tarasconian's bedroom.

"Quick! Dress yourself quickly! Your Moorish beauty is found, Her name
is Baya. She's scarce twenty--as pretty as a love, and already a widow."

"A widow! What a slice of luck!" joyfully exclaimed Tartarin, who
dreaded Oriental husbands.

"Ay, but woefully closely guarded by her brother."

"Oh, the mischief!"

"A savage chap who vends pipes in the Orleans bazaar."

Here fell a silence.

"A fig for that!" proceeded the prince; "you are not the man to be
daunted by such a trifle; and, anyhow, this old corsair can be pacified,
I daresay, by having some pipes bought of him. But be quick! On with
your courting suit, you lucky dog!"

Pale and agitated, with his heart brimming over with love, the
Tarasconian leaped out of his couch, and, as he hastily buttoned up his
capacious nether garment, wanted to know how he should act.

"Write straightway to the lady and ask for a tryst."

"Do you mean to say she knows French?" queried the Tarasconian
simpleton, with the disappointed mien of one who had believed thoroughly
in the Orient.

"Not one word of it," rejoined the prince imperturbably; "but you can
dictate the billet-doux, and I will translate it bit by bit."

"O prince, how kind you are!"

The lover began striding up and down the bedroom in silent meditation.

Naturally a man does not write to a Moorish girl in Algiers in the same
way as to a seamstress of Beaucaire. It was a very lucky thing that
our hero had in mind his numerous readings, which allowed him, by
amalgamating the Red Indian eloquence of Gustave Aimard's Apaches with
Lamartine's rhetorical flourishes in the "Voyage en Orient," and some
reminiscences of the "Song of Songs," to compose the most Eastern letter
that you could expect to see. It opened with:

"Like unto the ostrich upon the sandy waste"--

and concluded by: