hungry, wretched, hopeless. They had,
indeed, come to help in the ceremony; for,
when the great man's gilded feet touched the
deck of their flying ship, the comites would
give two shrill whistles;—the first was for
attention; on hearing the second, they gave
a lamentable, piteous howl of welcome, which
must have been most dolorous and terrible
to hear.

When the waves were rolling up in green
alps, snow-capped, and threatening—the
galleys could not put to sea; and, such slaves
as had trades, took to working, planing, shoe-
making, weaving, and painting: such poor
serfs as had none were taught to knit coarse
stockings, the comites supplying them with
yarn, and paying them for all they did half
the usual price; and that not in money, but
in broken meat and watered wine. To be
caught sending for wine from the shore, was
to be turned up, and bastinadoed incontinently.
The most touching sight of all in
these wet, stormy, dark days, was to see the
poor, low-browed boors, who knew no trade,
and could not even read or knit, busying
themselves, and trying to make themselves useful
and acceptable, by cleaning their comrades'
clothes, or freeing them from the torments of
parasitical life; for even the beggar has his
courtiers.

Such perpetual toil, imprisonment, and bad
diet, was already breaking out in fever and
sickness. For the sufferers there was a
snug hospital in a close, noisome, dark corner
of the galley's hold, to which light and air
came only in a Rembrandt sort of way,
through a miserable scuttle, two feet square.
At each end of this room was a fanlar,
or scaffold, on which the sick were thrown,
without beds or pallets. When the scaffold
grew full, the slaves were laid out on the
cables, sometimes as many as eighty at once,
stench and pestilence ruling supreme, and
tormenting them in various ways. The
chaplains, who came into this den of death
to confess the dying, wore a night-gown, to
protect their clothes from the vermin. In this
dreadful hole there was only three feet space
between the scaffold and the ceiling. The
confessor had to throw himself down on his
stomach at the dying men's sides, so as to
listen to the groans of their confessions.
The place was so horrible, that the sick
preferred to die straining at the oar, rather
than sink into the stinking darkness.

There was a surgeon kept to attend to
these lazars of humanity, but how could he
fight against such invitations and bribes to
pestilence and death ? There was also a supply
of the best drugs furnished by the French
Government; but the surgeon generally
considered these as mere perquisites.

Every one preyed on these poor wretches.
For instance:—during sickness, the king
ordered every man in the dark hold to have
a pound of fresh bread, a pound of fresh meat,
and two ounces of rice, every day ; but
the steward stole the allowances, and let the
slaves die unheeded, generally contriving to
make a fortune in about six campaigns.
Seventy sick men would be fed on twenty
pounds of bad, cheap meat, soaked in hot
water. At these frauds the surgeon and
steward connived. Sometimes a simple-
minded, warm-hearted chaplain would
astonish the silk-coated minister of marine
at Versailles by the narrative of these horrors,
and obtain a promise of redress, forgotten as
soon as made.

There were in the galleys five sorts of
persons,—seamen, Turks, deserters, criminals,
and Protestants. The Turks were brought
as stout-limbed gladiator- men, to manage the
stroke-oars, and were called Vogueavants.
They had the same allowance as the soldiers,
and were ranked with the upper slaves, who
pulled in the Banc du quarta, or the Camille
and les Espaliers. They were  generally very
stout men, who wore no chains, but had a ring
round the ankles. They were servants to the
officers, and were eminently honest and trusty.
When they arrived at any port, they had
liberty to trade, so that some of them were
worth three or four hundred pounds, which,
to the shame of Christians, they generally sent
home to their wives and families. They
were very kind and  charitable to each other,
and very strict in their religious observances:
natural enough; for exiles keep religious by
the pressure around them of a repugnant faith.
These Turkish rowers, especially at the
Ramadan fast, the first moon of the year,
never ate or drank from sunrise to sun down,
in spite of all the toil and labour at the oars
which they pulled, looking faint and hollow-
eyed as ghosts. If a Turk were imprisoned,
his companions always interceded, in a
turbaned mob, with the captain for him. If one
was sick, the rest clubbed to buy him meat,
or purchase him drugs, or tonics. In short,
as an eye-witness says, the Christians in the
galleys seemed to turn Turks, and the Turks
to turn Christians. They were very obdurate
against any chaplain who tried to convert
them, declaring they would rather turn dogs
than be of a religion that was so cruel as to
suffer so many crimes.

These Turks, during mass, were put into
the caique or long boat, where they smoked,
talked, and scoffed; safe from the last of
the comites. In spite, however, of their
being so well treated, they sighed for
liberty: the very name of a galley being
terrible to them. They generally remained
slaves for life, unless when they grew
very old and unserviceable, they meet with
friends who would buy them off.

Fops in the Palais Royal used to tell stories
of men who, when released, would not quit
the galleys: we now may judge how far these
stories were probable.

The fançoniers, or deserters, were generally
poor peasants who had committed the
unpardonable offence of buying salt in some