Discouraged by this unlooked-for circumstance, and feeling that it was useless to continue the unequal strife, they gradually slackened their fire, and at last it ceased altogether. On this a slave appeared on the bow of the Algerine vessel, who hailed them in their own language, bidding them, if they hoped for mercy, to strike to Algiers. A Turk then advanced, holding in his hand a green silk flag studded with silver crescents interlacing each other, which he waved in the air. The Christians, looking upon further resistance as hopeless, gave themselves up to all the grief that the idea of slavery inspires in the breasts of freemen, until the master of the vessel, fearing that a further delay of submission would only serve to irritate their barbarian conqueror, hauled down his colours, threw himself into a boat with some of his sailors, and went to surrender to the Algerine corsair. [Illustration: surrender] The latter immediately sent a portion of his crew on board the Spanish vessel to examine, or rather to pillage it of all that it contained. The Tunisian pirate gave similar orders to some of his men, so that all the passengers it contained were in an instant disarmed and plundered, and were shortly afterwards exchanged into the Algerine vessel, when the two pirates divided their prisoners by lot. It would have been at least some consolation for Mendoza and his friend to have both fallen into the hands of the same corsair; they would have found their chains somewhat the less heavy to have borne them together; but Fortune, apparently disposed to make them feel the terrors of her caprice, allotted Don Fabricio to the pirate of Tunis, and Don Juan to his competitor of Algiers. Picture to yourself the grief of the two friends, when told that they must part. They threw themselves at the feet of the corsairs, and entreated them that they might not be separated. But their entreaties were vain; the barbarians before whom they knelt were too much accustomed to the sight of human misery not to be proof against the prayers of their present victims. On the contrary, judging by their demeanour that the two captives were men of wealth and station, and that they would consequently pay a weighty ransom, they were the more resolved to divide them.