mmovable till morning,--and, notwithstanding the
number collected, not a sound was heard during the night.

The routine of every ordinary day, when we were not travelling, was
similar to that I have described.

Our position in the camp had not improved of late. By some means or
other I had offended my hasty mistress and her young daughters, and this
prejudicing the mind of the sheikh against me, I was ordered to perform
the same sort of service as that to which Halliday and Ben had been
condemned; while we were told that from henceforth we must march, like
the other slaves, on foot. This encouraged a marabout, who hitherto had
not interfered with us, to insist that we should turn Mohammedans; and
every day we were summoned to hear him abuse the Christians, and to
listen to his arguments in favour of the faith of the Prophet. Boxall,
too, had not been so successful in his cures as at first. One of his
patients, suffering from some internal disease, and who had broken his
arm by a fall from a camel, died, and Boxall was accused of killing
him--though he protested his innocence, and even the sheikh said that
the man might have died from other causes. But from that day the people
lost faith in him; and he was finally reduced from his post as
surgeon-general of the tribe to serve with us as a camel-driver.

Though the life he had now to bear, however, was one of daily toil, he
accepted his position without complaining. "I confess, my dear
Charlie," he said to me soon afterwards, "that I often felt ashamed of
myself, while I was enjoying the favour of the sheikh and the abundant
food he provided for me,--simply because I happened to know a little
about medicine and surgery,--to see you and Halliday ill-treated and
badly fed, and to be unable to help you. However, now that we are
together, perhaps we may be better able to manage some means of escape.
I have been endeavouring to calculate our present position, and I
believe that we are not more than four hundred miles south of the
borders of Morocco or Algiers. Should we reach Morocco, we might not be
much better off in some respects than we are at present, as the Moors
are even more fanatical than these wandering Arabs; but we might find
the means of communicating with one of the English consuls on the coast,
and probably obtain our release: whereas, if we could get into the
neighbourhood of the frontier of Algiers, we might, on escaping, place
ourselves under the pr