Some French merchants, established at Tripoli, exhausted their powers of conjecture on the singular taste of their compatriot, who came, as they thought, through mere caprice, to inhabit a wild and deserted coast. Some attributed this eccentricity to a violent, desperate grief; others saw, if not an unpardonable folly, a monomania, at least, in his strange determination. These last suppositions did not lack foundation. At certain periods of the year, Pog, it was said, was subject to such attacks of despair and rage that belated herdsmen, passing his solitary house at night, would hear furious and frantic cries. Three or four years passed in this manner. To distract his mind from gloomy thoughts, and to recuperate his health, Pog made long voyages at sea in a small vessel, but a very smooth and swift-sailing ship which he himself managed with rare skill. His crew consisted of two young slave Moors. One day, one of the most famous and cruel corsairs of Tripoli, named Kemal-Reis, came near perishing with his galley, which ran aground on the Coast a short distance from the house of Pog. Pog was just returning from one of his voyages. Recognising the galley of Kemal-Reis, he set sail toward her, and rendered her the most efficient aid. One of Pog’s slaves reported later that he had heard him say, “Man would be too happy if all the wolves and tigers were destroyed.” So the saving of Kemal-Reis, dreaded for reason of his cruelties, was due to the bitter misanthropy of Pog. Instead of yielding to an impulse of natural generosity, he desired to preserve to humanity one of its most terrible scourges. A short time after this event Kemal-Reis visited the isolated house of the Frenchman, and, by degrees, a sort of intimacy was established between the pirate and the misanthrope. One day the newsmongers of Tripoli learned with astonishment that Pog had embarked on board the galley of Kemal-Reis. They supposed the Frenchman to be very rich, and that he had freighted the Tripolitan vessel in order to take a voyage of pleasure on the coast of Barbary and Egypt and Syria. To the great astonishment of the public, Kemal-Reis returned a month after his departure, with his galley filled with French slaves, captured from the coasts of Languedoc and Provence, and the rumour was current in Tripoli that the favourable results of this audacious enter-prise were owing to the information and advice given by Pog, who knew better than any one else the weak points on the seashore of France. This rumour soon acquired such probability that our consul at Tripoli deemed it his duty to inform against Pog, and to instruct the ministers of Louis XIII. of what had happened.