His Excellency.—­“What’s your business?”

Traveller.—­“I will let your Excellency know to-morrow.”

I then proceeded to the house of Mr. Phillips, where I took up my quarters.  Mr. Willshire, our vice-consul, was absent, having gone up to Morocco with all the principal merchants of Mogador, to pay a visit to the Emperor.

The port of Mogador had to-day a most wild and desolate appearance, which was rendered still more dreary and hideous by a dark tempest sweeping over it.  On the shore, there was no appearance of life, much less of trade and shipping.  All had abandoned it, save a guard, who lay stretched at the gate of the waterport, like a grim watch-dog.  From this place, we proceeded to the merchants’ quarter of the town, which was solitary and immersed in profound gloom.  Altogether, my first impressions of Mogador were most unfavourable, I went to bed and dreamt of winds and seas, and struggled with tempests the greater part of the night.  Then I was shipwrecked off the Canaries; thrown on the coast of Wadnoun, and made a slave by the wild Arabs wandering in the Desert—­I awoke.

Mr. Phillips, mine host, soon became my right-hand man.  His extraordinary character, and the adventures of his life are worth a brief notice.  Phillips said he was descended from those York Jews, who, on refusing to pay a contribution levied on them by one of our most Christian kings, had a tooth drawn out every morning (without the aid of chloroform), until they satisfied the cruel avarice of the tyrant.  In person, Phillips was a smart old gentleman, with the ordinary lineaments of his race stamped on his countenance.  The greater part of his life has been spent in South America, where he attained the honours of aide-de-camp to Bolivar.  In those sanguinary revolutions, heaving with the birth of the young republic, he had often been shut up in the capilla to be shot, and was rescued always by the Jesuit fathers, who pitied and saved the poor Jew, on his expressing himself favourable to Christianity.  Returning to England, after twenty years’ absence, his mother did not fully recognize him, until he one day got up and admired, with youthful ardour, a china figure on the chimney-piece, which had been his toy in his boyhood.  On the occurrence of this little domestic incident, the mother passionately embraced her lost prodigal, once dead, but now “alive again.”  Phillips came to Mogador on a military speculation, and offered to take the command of the Emperor’s cavalry against all his enemies.

This audacity of a Jew filled the Moor with alarm.  “How could a Jew, who was not a devil, propose such an insult to the Commander of the Faithful, as to presume to take the charge of his invincible warriors!” Nevertheless, the little fellow weathered the storm, and got appointed “captain of the port of Mogador,” with the liberal salary of about thirty shillings per month; but this did not prevent our aide-de-camp,