Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/190

 them. All this you must not only bear patiently from the snivelling rascal, and hold your tongue, but, if you can bring yourself to it, you must kiss his hand, or foot, and beg the dirty boy not to be angry with you. For food nothing is given but two small cakes of biscuit.

When they sail to some island where Christians live, you can sometimes beg, or, if you have money, buy yourself a little wine, and sometimes a little porridge, or soup. So too, when we rested one, two, three, or more days by the shore, we knitted gloves and stockings of cotton, sold them, and sometimes bought ourselves additional food, which we cooked ourselves in the vessel. Although the benches in this vessel were somewhat small, five of us sat fettered on each. We had also abundance of lice and bugs; but our skins and bodies were already so covered with bites, and scorched by the heat of the sun, that we felt little of this discomfort. Each of us certainly had two blue shirts and a reddish blouse—there were no other upper clothesbut we only dressed ourselves in them at night. Indeed, we had a most miserable, sorrowful life, and worse than death, in that vessel.

Sometimes a draught of wine, which grows on the island Alla Marmora, where they hew marble, and is very good, cheered and strengthened us amidst this torture. We likewise enjoyed the good Wallachian cheese, which they brought from Wallachia and Moldavia to Constantinople and sold. The Wallachians make it in the following manner. They take a fresh skin from a newly-killed goat, make a bag out of it with the needle, turn the smooth side out and the hairy side in, fill it with milk tillit looks like a bagpipe-bag, sew it up, leave