ink when my late owners were saving
the stone from the wreck, that I could get them to enter the walls of
some seaport town, and that possibly they might take me along with them.
But that hope has proved as delusive as all others I have entertained
since shipwrecked on the shore of this accursed country. I believe
there are a few who are fortunate enough to regain their liberty; but
the majority of sailors cast away on the Saaran coast never have the
good fortune to get away from it. They die under the hardships and
ill-treatment to which they are exposed upon the desert, without leaving
a trace of their existence any more than the dogs or camels belonging to
their common masters.

"You have asked me to give an account of my life since I have been
shipwrecked. I cannot do that; but I shall give you an easy rule by
which you may know all about it. We will suppose you have all been
three months in the Saara, and Bill here says that I have been here ten
years; therefore I have experienced about forty times as long a period
of slavery as one of yourselves. Now, multiply the sum total of your
sufferings by forty, and you will have some idea of what I have
undergone.

"You have probably witnessed some scenes of heartless cruelty--scenes
that shocked and wounded the most sensitive feelings of your nature. I
have witnessed forty times as many. While suffering the agonies of
thirst and hunger, you may have prayed for death as a relief to your
anguish. Where such have been your circumstances once, they have been
mine for forty times.

"You may have had some bright hopes of escaping, and once more
revisiting your native land; and then have experienced the bitterness of
disappointment. In this way I have suffered forty times as much as any
one of you."

Sailor Bill and the young gentlemen who had been for several days under
the pleasant hallucination that they were on the high road to freedom,
were again awakened to a true sense of their situation by the words of a
man far more experienced than they in the deceitful ways of the desert.

Before separating for the night, the three mids learnt from Bill and his
brother that the latter had been first officer of the ship that had
brought him to the coast. They could perceive by his conversation that
he was an intelligent man, one whose natural abilities and artificial
acquirements were far superior to those of their shipmate, the old
man-of-war's-man.

"If such an acco