This punishment was just and deserved, but he remembered that the unhappy captive had been, up to that time, gentle, submissive, and industrious. Yet such was the inflexibility of his character that he reproached himself for this involuntary pity, as a culpable weakness. Finally the solemn flourishes of the trumpets of the galley announced that the execution was finished. He heard the slow and regular step of the soldiers and sailors, who were breaking ranks after having assisted at the punishment. Soon Father Elzear entered, pale, dismayed, his eyes bathed in tears, and his cassock stained with blood. “Ah, my brother! my brother! if you assisted at these executions, never in your life could you have the heart to order them.” “And the Moor?” asked the commander, without replying otherwise to his brother. “I held his poor hands in mine; he endured the first blows with heroic resignation, closing his eyes to arrest the tears, and saying nothing but, ‘My good father, do not abandon me’. But when the pain became intolerable, when the blood began to gush out under the thongs, the unhappy man seemed to concentrate all his powers upon one thought, which might give him courage to endure this martyrdom. His face took on an expression of painful ecstasy; then he seemed to conquer pain, even to defy it, and cried, with an accent which came from the very depths of his paternal heart, ‘My son! my son! Acoub, my beloved child!’” As he told of the punishment and last words of the Moor, Father Elzear could no longer restrain his tears; he wept as he continued: “Ah, Pierre, if you had heard him--if you only knew with what passionate feeling he uttered those words, ‘My son! my beloved child,’ you would have had pity on this poor father, whom they have carried off in a state of unconsciousness.” What was the astonishment of Father Elzear, when he saw the commander, overwhelmed with emotion, hide his head in his hands and cry, sobbing convulsively: “A son! a son! I, too, have a son!” CHAPTER XXIV. THE POLACRE The day after the execution of the sentence on the Moor, the north wind was blowing with increasing violence. The waves hurled themselves with fury against the girdle of rocks through which opened the narrow passage which led into the road of Tolari. About eleven o’clock in the morning, Captain Simon, mounted on the platform of the rambade, was talking with Captain Hugues about the punishment which occurred the day before, and of the courage of the Moor. Suddenly they saw a polacre, her sails almost torn away, flying before the tempest with the rapidity of an arrow, and about to enter the dangerous pass of which we have spoken. Sometimes the frail vessel, rising on the crest of the towering waves, would show the edge of her keel running with foam like the breast of a race-horse. Again, sinking in the hollow of the waves, she would plunge with such violence that her stem would be almost perpendicular.