that caused his eyes to flash and his brows to contract. A
sbirro, or officer of justice, stood near him, whether by chance or
otherwise we know not. Touching the sbirro on the shoulder, he pointed
to a group under the shade of an archway, and said in a low tone--

"Go, fetch hither that scoundrel Blindi."

The sbirro at once stepped towards the group, which consisted of two
persons. One was an old, apparently dying, slave; the other was a
strong middle-aged man, in a quaint blue gown, who knelt by his side,
and poured something from a flask into his mouth.

The sbirro seized this man rudely by the neck, and said--

"Get up, Blindi, and come along with me." Laying the head of the old
man gently on the ground, and rising with some wrath, Blindi demanded,
in English so broken that we find difficulty in mending it sufficiently
to be presented to the reader--

"Wot for you means by dat?"

"Speak your mother tongue, you dog, and make haste, for the Minister of
Marine wants you."

"Oh! mos' awfrul," exclaimed Blindi, turning pale, and drawing his blue
garment hastily round him, as he meekly followed the officer of
justice--whose chief office, by the way, was to administer injustice.

The man whom we have styled Blindi was a somewhat peculiar character.
He was an Algerine by birth, but had served several years in the British
navy, and had acquired a smattering of the English language--forecastle
English, as a matter of course. In consequence of this, and of having
lost an eye in the service, he had obtained a pension, and the
appointment of interpreter to all his Britannic Majesty's ships visiting
Algiers. He dwelt at the harbour, or Marina, where he excited the
wonder and admiration of all the Turks and Moors by his volubility in
talking English. He was a man of no small importance, in his own
estimation, and was so proud of his powers as a linguist that he
invariably interlarded his converse with English phrases, whether he was
addressing Turk, Jew, or Christian. Lingua Franca--a compound of nearly
all the languages spoken on the shores of the Mediterranean--was the
tongue most in use at the Marina of Algiers at that time, but as this
would be unintelligible to our reader, we will give Blindi's
conversations in his favourite language. What his real name was we have
failed to discover. The loss of his eye had obtained for him in the
navy the name of Blind Bob. In his native city this was Italianised
into B