"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
