Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/34

xviii some of my brother physicians among their fellow-Christians at home.

rev. Mr Tonyn, the king's chaplain at Algiers, was absent upon leave before I arrived in that regency. The Protestant shipmasters who came into the port, and had need of spiritual assistance, found here a blank that was not easily filled up; I should therefore have been obliged to take upon myself the disagreeable office of burying the dead, and the more chearful, though more troublesome one, of marrying and baptizing the living; matters that were entirely out of my way, but to which the Roman Catholic clergy would contribute no assistance.

was a Greek priest, a native of Cyprus, a very venerable man, part seventy years of age, who had attached himself to me from my first arrival in Algiers. This man was of a very social and chearful temper, and had, besides, a more than ordinary knowledge of his own language. I had taken him to my house as my chaplain, read Greek with him daily, and spoke it at times when I could receive his correction and instruction. It was not that I, at this time of day, needed to learn Greek, I had long understood that language perfectly; what I wanted was the pronunciation, and reading by accent, of which the generality of English scholars are perfectly ignorant, and to which it is owing that they apprehend the Greek spoken and written in the Archipelago is materially different from that language which we read in books, and which a few weeks conversation in the islands will teach them it is not. I had in this, at that time, no other view than mere convenience during my passage through the Archipelago,