e derision and persecution
of the Moors, who were constantly upbraiding and reviling him, and
telling him that his soul would be lost, unless he became a
Mahommedan, insomuch that his life was becoming intolerable.

Mr. Dupuis, speaking of the conduct which Adams received from the
Moors, says, "I can easily believe Adams' statement of the brutal
treatment he experienced at Wadinoon. It is consistent with the
accounts I have always heard of the people of that country, who I
believe to be more bigoted and cruel than even the remoter
inhabitants of the desert. In the frequent instances which have come
under my observation, the general effect of the treatment of the
Arabs on the minds of the Christian captives, has been most
deplorable. On the first arrival of these unfortunate men at
Mogadore, if they have been any considerable time in slavery, they
appear lost to reason and feeling, their spirits broken, and their
whole faculties sunk in a species of stupor, which I am unable
adequately to describe. Habited like the meanest Arabs of the desert,
they appear degraded even below the negro slave. The succession of
hardships, which they endure, from the caprice and tyranny of their
purchasers, without any protecting law to which they can appeal for
alleviation or redress, seems to destroy every spring of exertion or
hope in their minds; they appear indifferent to every thing around
them; abject, servile, and brutified."

"Adams alone was, in some respects, an exception from this
description. I do not recollect any ransomed Christian slave, who
discovered a greater elasticity of spirit, or who sooner recovered
from the indifference and stupor here described."

It is to be remarked, that the Christian captives are invariably
worse treated than the idolatrous or pagan slaves, whom the Arabs,
either by theft or purchase, bring from the interior of Africa, and
that religious bigotry is the chief cause of this distinction. The
zealous disciples of Mahomet consider the negroes merely as ignorant,
unconverted beings, upon whom, by the act of enslaving them, they are
conferring a benefit, by placing them within reach of instruction in
"the true belief;" and the negroes, having no hopes of ransom, and
being often enslaved when children, are in general, soon converted to
the Mahommedan faith. The Christians, on the contrary, are looked
upon as hardened infidels, and as deliberate despisers of the
prophet's call; and as they in genera