with the agility of monkeys.  There was one in especial—­a slight, well-made fellow about twenty, with a white turban cleaner than the rest—­who contrived to cast wonderful glances from the masthead over the barrier at Rosette, who actually smiled in return at ce pauvre garcon, and smiled the more for Mademoiselle Julienne’s indignation.  Suddenly, however, a shrill shout made him descend hastily, and the old Turk’s voice might be heard in its highest key, no doubt shrieking out maledictions on all the ancestry of the son of a dog who durst defile his eyes with gazing at the shameless daughters of the Frank.  Little Ulysse was, however, allowed to disport himself wherever he pleased; and after once, under Arthur’s protection, going forward, he found himself made very welcome, and offered various curiosities, such as shells, corals, and a curious dried little hippocampus or seahorse.

This he brought back in triumph, to the extreme delight of his sister’s classical mind.  ‘Oh mamma, mamma,’ she cried, ’Ulysse really has got the skeleton of a Triton.  It is exactly like the stone creatures in the Champs Elysees.’

There was no denying the resemblance, and it so increased the confusion in Estelle’s mind between the actual and the mythological, that Arthur told her that she was looking out for the car of Amphitrite to arise from the waters.  Anxiety and trouble had made him much better acquainted with Madame de Bourke, who was grateful to him for his kindness to her children, and not without concern as to whether she should be able to procure his release as well as her own at Algiers.  For Laurence Callaghan she had no fears, since he was born at Paris, and a naturalised French subject like her husband and his brother; but Arthur was undoubtedly a Briton, and unless she could pass him off as one of her suite, it would depend on the temper of the English Consul whether he should be viewed as a subject or as a rebel, or simply left to captivity until his Scottish relations should have the choice of ransoming him.

She took a good deal of pains to explain the circumstances to him as well as to all who could understand them; for though she hoped to keep all together, and to be able to act for them herself, no one could guess how they might be separated, and she could not shake off that foreboding of misfortune which had haunted her from the first.

The kingdom of Algiers was, she told them, tributary to the Turkish Sultan, who kept a guard of Janissaries there, from among whom they themselves elected the Dey.  He was supposed to govern by the consent of a divan, but was practically as despotic as any Eastern sovereign; and the Aga of the Janissaries was next in authority to him.  Piracy on the Mediterranean was, as all knew, the chief occupation of the Turks and Moors of any spirit or enterprise, a Turk being in authority in each vessel to secure that the Sultan had his share, and that the capture was so conducted as not to involve Turkey in dangerous wars with European powers.  Capture by the Moors had for several centuries been one of the ordinary contingencies of a voyage, and the misfortune that had happened to the party was not at all an unusual one.