"Do buy me for a little piece of cloth. I should like to be your slave," said one little fellow that Gordon rescued from a gang of slavers. It was this boy, Capsune, who years afterwards asked Gordon's sister if she was quite sure that Gordon Pasha still kept his blue eyes. "Do you think he can see all through me now?" he asked, and said, "I am quite sure Gordon Pasha could see quite well in the dark, because he has the light inside him." Most of the slaves that the Arab slavers had in their gangs were little children. In one caravan that Gordon rescued there were ninety slaves, very few over sixteen, most of them little mites of boys and girls, perfect skeletons. They had been brought over 500 miles of desert, and the ninety were all that lived out of about four hundred. When Gordon rescued them, they knew the gentle, tender Gordon, whose tenderness was like a mother's. It was another Gordon that the slavers knew--a man terrible in his anger. Having taken from the ruffianly Arabs who had so cruelly treated the little children, their slaves, their stolen cattle, and their ivory, he would have them stripped and flogged, and driven naked into the desert. For two months he was at Saubat River, a lonely and desolate country, the prey of slavers. It was so dull and dreary a place, that the Arab soldiers were sent there for a punishment, as the Russians are sent to Siberia. But Gordon was too busy to be dull. He was always so full of thought for others, that he never had time to be sorry for himself. "_I am sure it is the secret of true happiness to be content with what we actually have_," he wrote from Saubat. From there, too, he wrote: "I took a poor old bag-of-bones into my camp a month ago, and have been feeding her up; but yesterday she was quietly taken off, and now knows all things. She had her tobacco up to the last." Looking out of his camp he saw a poor woman, "a wisp of bones," feebly struggling up the road in wind and rain. He sent some dhoora to her by one of his men, and thought she had been taken safely to one of the huts. All through that wet and stormy night he heard a baby crying. At dawn he found the woman lying in a pool of mud, apparently dead, while men passed and repassed her, and took no notice. Her baby, not quite a year old, sat and wailed in some long grass near her. The woman was actually not dead, but she died a few days later. The baby boy was none the worse for his night out, and drank off a gourd of milk "like a man." Gordon gave him to a family to look after, paying for him daily with some maize. Mosquitoes and other insects were a pest wherever he went, but at Saubat he had the extra pest of rats. They ran over his mosquito nets, ate his soap, his books, his boots, and his shaving-brush, and screamed and fought all night, until he invented a clever trap and stopped their thefts.