were held, Peter sat down and
groaned.

"What's wrong now?" asked the middy, with anxious looks.

"Oh! Geo'ge, eberyt'ing's wrong," he replied, flinging himself down on
a rustic seat with a reckless air and rolling his eyes horribly.
"Eberyt'ing's wrong. De world's all wrong togidder--upside down and
inside out."

The middy might have laughed at Peter's expression if he had not been
terribly alarmed.

"Come, Peter, tell me. Is Hester safe?"

"I don' know, Geo'ge."

"Don't know! Why d'you keep me in such anxiety? Speak, man, speak!
What has happened?"

"How kin I speak, Geo'ge, w'en I's a'most busted wid runnin' out here to
tell you?"

The perspiration that stood on Peter's sable brow, and the heaving of
his mighty chest, told eloquently of the pace at which he had been
running.

"Dis is de way ob it, Geo'ge. I had it all fro' de lips ob Sally
herself, what saw de whole t'ing." As the narrative which Peter the
Great had to tell is rather too long to be related in his own "lingo,"
we will set it down in ordinary language.

One day while Hester was, as usual, passing her father, and in the very
act of dropping the customary supply of food, she observed that one of
the slaves had drawn near and was watching her with keen interest. From
the slave's garb and bearing any one at all acquainted with England
could have seen at a glance that he was a British seaman, though hard
service and severe treatment, with partial starvation, had changed him
much. He was in truth the stout sailor-like man who had spoken a few
words to Foster the day he landed in Algiers, and who had contemptuously
asserted his utter ignorance of gardening.

The slaves, we need hardly say, were not permitted to hold intercourse
with each other for fear of their combining to form plans of rebellion
and escape, but it was beyond the power of their drivers to be
perpetually on the alert, so that sometimes they did manage to exchange
a word or two without being observed.

That afternoon it chanced that Sommers had to carry a stone to a certain
part of the wall. It was too heavy for one man to lift, the sailor was
therefore ordered to help him. While bearing the burden towards the
wall, the following whispered conversation took place.

"I say, old man," observed the sailor, "the little girl that gives you
biscuits every day is no more a nigger than I am."

"Right!" whispered the merchant anxiously, for he had supposed that no
one had