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304 CHAPTER XXIII.

IN WHICH DANGER LOOMS VERY DARK IN AND AROUND THE PIRATE CITY.

this time four vessels entered the port of Algiers. One was a French man-of-war with a British merchantman as a prize. The other was an Algerine felucca with a Sicilian brig which she had captured along with her crew of twenty men.

There were a number of men, women, and children on board the Frenchman's prize, all of whom, when informed of the port into which they had been taken, were thrown into a state of the utmost consternation, giving themselves up for lost—doomed to slavery for the remainder of their lives,—for the piratical character of the Algerines was well known and much dreaded in those days by all the maritime nations. Newspapers and general knowledge, however, were not so prevalent then as now, and for a thousand Englishmen of the uneducated classes who knew that the Algerines were cruel pirates,