have expressed more gratefully. He was
very affable with us all, and would sometimes keep Jew Johnny away
from his work for hours, chatting with us or the English officers who
would lounge into our as yet unfinished store. Sometimes he would come
down to breakfast, and spend the greater part of the day at Spring
Hill. Indeed, the wits of Spring Hill used to laugh, and say that the
crafty Pacha was throwing his pocket-handkerchief at Madame Seacole,
widow; but as the honest fellow candidly confessed he had three wives
already at home, I acquit him of any desire to add to their number.

The Pacha's great ambition was to be familiar with the English
language, and at last nothing would do but he must take lessons of me.
So he would come down, and sitting in my store, with a Turk or so at
his feet, to attend to his most important pipe, by inserting little
red-hot pieces of charcoal at intervals, would try hard to sow a few
English sentences in his treacherous memory. He never got beyond half
a dozen; and I think if we had continued in the relation of pupil and
mistress until now, the number would not have been increased greatly.
"Madame Seacole," "Gentlemen, good morning," and "More champagne,"
with each syllable much dwelt upon, were his favourite sentences. It
was capital fun to hear him, when I was called away suddenly to attend
to a customer, or to give a sick man medicine, repeating gravely the
sentence we had been studying, until I passed him, and started him
with another.

Very frequently he would compliment me by ordering his band down to
Spring Hill for my amusement. They played excellently well, and I used
to think that I preferred their music to that of the French and
English regimental bands. I laughed heartily one day, when, in
compliance with the kind-hearted Anglo-Turkish Pacha's orders, they
came out with a grand new tune, in which I with difficulty recognised
a very distant resemblance to "God save the Queen."

Altogether he was a capital neighbour, and gave such strict orders to
his men to respect our property that we rarely lost anything. On the
whole, the Turks were the most honest of the nations there (I except
the English and the Sardinians), and the most tractable. But the
Greeks hated them, and showed their hate in every way. In bringing up
things for the Pacha's use they would let the mules down, and smash
their loads most relentlessly. Now and then they suffered, as was the
case one day when I pa