We have spoken hitherto of the leaders, but what of the men of which their following was composed? Rough, rude, and reckless, these latter lived but to fight and to plunder; to them any other life would have seemed impossible, and indeed this was practically the fact. In the communities in which they lived the adult male had no other means of gaining a livelihood. Since their expulsion from their ancient homes no ordered and peaceful method of existence had been possible for them. In the surroundings in which their forefathers had lived the arts of peace had been carried on in a civilisation to which there had been none comparable in the world as it then existed; on all this the Moslem had now to turn his back, and to earn a precarious living by the strong hand. War, sanguinary and incessant, was henceforward to be his lot, and it must be said that he turned to this ancient avocation with a zest which left but little to be desired from the point of view of those by whom he was led. In the new life of bloodshed and adventure he seemed to delight. Like the free-lance in all ages, he seems to have squandered his booty as soon as it was acquired, and then to sea once more, to face the desperate hazard of an encounter with the knights, to raid defenceless villages, to lie _perdu_ behind some convenient cape, dashing out from thence to plunder the argosy of the merchantman. Intolerable conditions of heat and cold he endured, he suffered from wounds, from fever, from hunger and thirst, from hope deferred, from voyages when no plunder came his way. His reward was the joy of the fight, the delight of the ambush skilfully laid, to see the decks of the enemy a dreadful shambles, with the Crescent flag of the Prophet above the detested emblem of the Cross. Then the return to Algiers laden with spoil: to tow behind him some luckless Christian ship, while aboard his own war-worn galley the drums beat and the trumpets sounded, and the banners floated free to the stainless Mediterranean sky. Then the procession of the captives through the crowded streets laden with what a short time before had been their own property—a mournful _cortège_ of men doomed to an everlasting slavery and of women destined for the harems of the Bashas. Thus was his life lived, and when death came it came as a rule from the slash of a sabre or the ball from an arquebus or a bombard; and then what matter, for had not Hassan Ali or Selim fallen in strife against the enemies of his faith, and did not the portals of heaven open wide to receive the man who had lost his life testifying to the fact that there was but one God, and that Mahomet was the Prophet of God?