stolen,"
she replied with a happy smile.

"But," said Gordon, "are you not sorry?"

"Oh no! we would rather have the cow."

"But you have eaten the cow, and the pleasure is over," said Gordon.

"Oh, but, all the same, we would sooner have the cow!"

Two little boys came smiling up to Gordon one day, and pressed him to
buy one of them for a little basketful of dhoora. Gordon bought one,
and both boys were delighted.

"Do buy me for a little piece of cloth. I should like to be your
slave," said one little fellow that Gordon rescued from a gang of
slavers. It was this boy, Capsune, who years afterwards asked Gordon's
sister if she was quite sure that Gordon Pasha still kept his blue
eyes. "Do you think he can see all through me now?" he asked, and
said, "I am quite sure Gordon Pasha could see quite well in the dark,
because he has the light inside him."

Most of the slaves that the Arab slavers had in their gangs were little
children. In one caravan that Gordon rescued there were ninety slaves,
very few over sixteen, most of them little mites of boys and girls,
perfect skeletons. They had been brought over 500 miles of desert, and
the ninety were all that lived out of about four hundred.

When Gordon rescued them, they knew the gentle, tender Gordon, whose
tenderness was like a mother's.

It was another Gordon that the slavers knew--a man terrible in his
anger. Having taken from the ruffianly Arabs who had so cruelly
treated the little children, their slaves, their stolen cattle, and
their ivory, he would have them stripped and flogged, and driven naked
into the desert.

For two months he was at Saubat River, a lonely and desolate country,
the prey of slavers. It was so dull and dreary a place, that the Arab
soldiers were sent there for a punishment, as the Russians are sent to
Siberia.

But Gordon was too busy to be dull. He was always so full of thought
for others, that he never had time to be sorry for himself.

"_I am sure it is the secret of true happiness to be content with what
we actually have_," he wrote from Saubat.

From there, too, he wrote: "I took a poor old bag-of-bones into my camp
a month ago, and have been feeding her up; but yesterday she was
quietly taken off, and now knows all things. She had her tobacco up to
the last."

Looking out of his camp he saw a poor woman, "a wisp of bones," feebly
struggling up the road in wind and rain. He sent some dhoora to her by
one of his