r and Minnie--who were also poor--toiling for years to procure
his ransom, filled him with oppressive dread. To throw the depressing
subject off his mind, he asked how the Frenchman had guessed that he was
an Englishman before he had heard him speak.

"I know your countrymen," he answered, "by their bearing. Besides, you
have been muttering in your sleep about `Mother and Minnie.' If the
latter is, as I suppose, your sweetheart--your _fiancee_--the sooner you
get her out of your mind the better, for you will never see her more."

Again Foster felt repelled by the harsh cynicism of the man, yet at the
same time he felt strangely attracted to him, a fact which he showed
more by his tones than his words when he said--

"My friend, you are not yet enrolled among the infallible prophets.
Whether I shall ever again see those whom I love depends upon the will
of God. But I don't wonder that with your sad experience you should
give way to despair. For myself, I will cling to the hope that God will
deliver me, and I would advise you to do the same."

"How many I have seen, who had the sanguine temperament, like yours,
awakened and crushed," returned the Frenchman. "See, there is one of
them," he added, pointing to a cell nearly opposite, in which a form was
seen lying on its back, straight and motionless. "That young man was
such another as you are when he first came here."

"Is he dead?" asked the midshipman, with a look of pity.

"Yes--he died in the night while you slept. It was attending to him in
his last moments that kept me awake. He was nothing to me but a
fellow-slave and sufferer, but I _was_ fond of him. He was hard to
conquer, but they managed it at last, for they beat him to death."

"Then they did _not_ conquer him," exclaimed Foster with a gush of
indignant pity. "To beat a man to death is to murder, not to conquer.
But you called him a young man. The corpse that lies there has thin
grey hair and a wrinkled brow."

"Nevertheless he was young--not more than twenty-seven--but six years of
this life brought him to what you see. He might have lived longer, as I
have, had he been submissive!"

Before Foster could reply, the grating of a rusty key in the door caused
a movement as well as one or two sighs and groans among the slaves, for
the keepers had come to summon them to work. The Frenchman rose and
followed the others with a hook of sullen indifference. Most of them
were without fetters, but