“When I besiege Tunis I shall present him to the inhabitants, who love him as much as they hate Muley Hassan. They will open their gates to me, and I shall gain the town without the loss of a single man: it will be then you who will be master. On my way thither I will do what harm I can to the Christians; I will endeavour to defeat Andrea Doria, who is my personal enemy and my rival in glory: should I succeed in defeating him your Majesty will possess the empire of the sea. Be then persuaded, great Prince, by me, and believe that he who is master of the sea will very shortly become master on land.” It is somewhat difficult to fathom the reasons which induced Barbarossa to treat Soliman to his sanctimonious diatribe concerning the King of Tunis; coming, as it did, from a pirate, it was merely ludicrous, and could not for one instant have deceived the remarkably shrewd person to whom it was addressed. The corsair stated the facts correctly, but the reasons which led to an Eastern autocrat disposing of his family in this manner were so obvious at the time that, if Soliman felt any emotion at all concerning the event, it was probably one of admiration! Regarded from the practical, apart from the sentimental side, what the proposition amounted to was that Barbarossa should attack a king with whom the Grand Turk had no sort of quarrel, and that, once his territory had been reft from him, that it should be handed over to the ruler of Constantinople for the greater glory of the Sublime Porte. What mental reservations there were on the part of the corsair we are not told, but had Soliman known him better he would have been aware that never had Barbarossa pulled any chestnuts from the fire of life which were not intended for his own eating; and that it was extremely unlikely, at his time of life, that he was now going to alter the habits of his long and strenuous career. There was one thing, however, that Kheyr-ed-Din was not; he was no bragger or boaster, and, whatever may have been his mental reservations in his interview with the Sultan, that which he stated he would do, that he did. And now the time had come when the grim old Sea-wolf had done with intrigue and the unaccustomed atmosphere of a Court and went back to his native element, the sea.