When he told them the recent plague in Morocco had killed both his wife and son their liquid eyes brimmed over. No whit less sympathetic were the three new beauties; they wept in concert, though ten minutes earlier Ortho had been an utter stranger to them. Their hearts were very tender. A black eunuch entered bearing the elaborate tea utensils. As he turned to go, MacBride called “_aji_,” pointing to the ground before him. The slave threw up his hands in protest. “Oh, no, lord, please.” “Kneel down,” the sailor commanded. “I’ll make you spring your ribs laughing, Saïd, my bonny. Give me your hand, Mohar.” “Lord, have mercy!” “Mercy be damned! Your hand, quick!” The piteous great creature extended a trembling hand, was grasped by the wrist and twisted onto his back. “Now, my pearls, my rosebuds,” said MacBride. The five little birds of paradise tucked their robes about them and surrounded the prostrate slave, tittering and wriggling their forefingers at him. Even before he was touched he screamed, but when the tickling began in earnest he went mad, doubling, screwing, clawing the air with his toes, shrieking like a soul in torment—which indeed he was. With the pearls and rosebuds it was evidently a favorite pastime; they tickled with diabolical cunning that could only come of experience, shaking with laughter and making sibilant noises the while—“Pish—piss-sh!” Finally when the miserable victim was rolling up the whites of his eyes, mouthing foam and seemed on the point of throwing a fit, MacBride released him and he escaped. The captain wiped the happy tears from his remaining eye and turned on Ortho as one recounting an interesting scientific observation. “Very thin-skinned for a Sambo. D’you know I believe he’d sooner take a four-bag at the gangway than a minute o’ that. I do, so help me; I believe he’d sooner be flogged. _Vee-ry_ curious. Come up and I’ll show you my command.” The Atlantic was invisible from the tower, sheeted under fog which, beneath a windless sky, stretched away to the horizon in woolly white billows. Ortho had an impression of a mammoth herd of tightly packed sheep. “There’s a three-knot tide under that, sweeping south, but it don’t ’pear to move it much,” MacBride observed. “I’ll warrant that bank ain’t higher nor a first-rate’s topgallant yard. I passed through the western squadron once in a murk like that there. Off Dungeness, it was. All their royals was sticking out, but my little hooker was trucks down, out o’ sight.” He pointed to the north. “Knitra’s over there, bit of a kasba like this. Er-rhossi has it; a sturdy fellow for a Greek, but my soul what a man to drink! Stayed here for a week and ’pon my conscience he had me baled dry in two days—_me_! Back there’s the forest, there’s pig . . . what are you staring at?” Ortho spun about guiltily. “Me? Oh, nothing, nothing, nothing. What were you saying? The forest . . .” He became suddenly engrossed in the view of the forest of Marmora.