by offering him a gilded coach and four horses. On the 27th October 1841 “it was driven to the Bardo with great pomp, in the presence of the French Consul and the officers of the steamer, by the coachman and footman in the King’s full-dress livery.” Ahmed Bey sent Louis Philippe “in return” an Arabian horse, a lion and lioness, two ostriches, and four antelopes. On the advice of Lord Aberdeen, the Bey decided to conciliate the Porte by sending an envoy to Constantinople as the bearer of a more than usually magnificent offering. The list of the presents thus forwarded fills several pages, beginning with “a new corvette, a remarkably fine one, carrying 26 guns, and fitted with stores of every description,” and ending with four snuff-boxes for the _Signori della Camera del Grand Signor_. In April 1842 slavery was finally abolished. In a letter to the English Government, the Bey declared that his action in this matter was entirely due to the representations of Sir Thomas Reade. The Sultan does not appear to have been altogether satisfied with the Bey’s munificence, and sent an agent to Tunis with instructions to insist on “the establishment of _ever so little regular tribute_, which might easily be remitted, but which would prove to some European Powers that the Bey and the Regency were not independent.” Turkish bearers of vizirial letters were always a serious matter at Tunis, and Ahmed Bey made an almost pathetic appeal to England to help him out of his difficulty. “It is not an easy matter,” he told Sir Thomas Reade, “to satisfy my suzerain’s envoys. When the last came to take leave I offered him 4000 dollars, but he disdainfully refused them in my presence, and I was obliged to give him six.” This particular envoy proved to be exceedingly difficult to manage, and when the Bey did not comply with his demands, he did his best to excite an insurrection. He had the pictures in his room pulled down as an insult to the faith of Islam, and spoke in all public places of the Bey’s undue partiality for infidels. To such an extent was this anti-christian _propaganda_ carried, that the Turkish emissary had hardly left Tunis, before a riot occurred at Goletta, which was quelled with considerable difficulty. The British Ambassador at Constantinople appears, however, to have succeeded in inducing the Porte to take a more favourable view of the conduct of his vassal.