y for him the creak and dip of the oars, the clank of chains,
and the lashes beating sharply upon the wretched Jew were sufficient to
muffle his voice. But the Moor heard him, and his dark eyes gleamed.

"There is a furnace seven times heated awaiting them, ) my brother," he
replied, with a confidence which seemed to be the source of his present
stoicism. "But art thou, then, not a Christian?"

He spoke in that queer language of the North African seaboard, that
lingua franca, which sounded like some French dialect interspersed with
Arabic words. But Sir Oliver made out his meaning almost by intuition.
He answered him in Spanish again, since although the Moor did not appear
to speak it yet it was plain he understood it.

"I renounce from this hour," he answered in his passion. "I will
acknowledge no religion in whose name such things are done. Look me at
that scarlet fruit of hell up yonder. See how daintily he sniffs at his
pomander lest his saintly nostrils be offended by the exhalations of
our misery. Yet are we God's creatures made in God's image like himself.
What does he know of God? Religion he knows as he knows good wine, rich
food, and soft women. He preaches self-denial as the way to heaven, and
by his own tenets is he damned." He growled an obscene oath as he heaved
the great oar forward. "A Christian I?" he cried, and laughed for the
first time since he had been chained to that bench of agony. "I am done
with Christians and Christianity!"

"Verily we are God's, and to Him shall we return," said the Moor.

That was the beginning of a friendship between Sir Oliver and this man,
whose name was Yusuf-ben-Moktar. The Muslim conceived that in Sir Oliver
he saw one upon whom the grace of Allah had descended, one who was
ripe to receive the Prophet's message. Yusuf was devout, and he applied
himself to the conversion of his fellow-slave. Sir Oliver listened to
him, however, with indifference. Having discarded one creed he would
need a deal of satisfying on the score of another before he adopted
it, and it seemed to him that all the glorious things urged by Yusuf in
praise of Islam he had heard before in praise of Christianity. But he
kept his counsel on that score, and meanwhile his intercourse with the
Muslim had the effect of teaching him the lingua franca, so that at the
end of six months he found himself speaking it like a Mauretanian with
all the Muslim's imagery and with more than the ordinary seasoning of