“Get up, Blindi, and come along with me.” Laying the head of the old man gently on the ground, and rising with some wrath, Blindi demanded, in English so broken that we find difficulty in mending it sufficiently to be presented to the reader—
“Wot for you means by dat?”
“Speak your mother tongue, you dog, and make haste, for the Minister of Marine wants you.”
“Oh! mos’ awfrul,” exclaimed Blindi, turning pale, and drawing his blue garment hastily round him, as he meekly followed the officer of justice—whose chief office, by the way, was to administer injustice.
The man whom we have styled Blindi was a somewhat peculiar character. He was an Algerine by birth, but had served several years in the British navy, and had acquired a smattering of the English language—forecastle English, as a matter of course. In consequence of this, and of having lost an eye in the service, he had obtained a pension, and the appointment of interpreter to all his Britannic Majesty’s ships visiting Algiers. He dwelt at the harbour, or Marina, where he excited the wonder and admiration of all the Turks and Moors by his volubility in talking English. He was a man of no small importance, in his own estimation, and was so proud of his powers as a linguist that he invariably interlarded his converse with English phrases, whether he was addressing Turk, Jew, or Christian. Lingua Franca—a compound of nearly all the languages spoken on the shores of the Mediterranean—was the tongue most in use at the Marina of Algiers at that time, but as this would be unintelligible to our reader, we will give Blindi’s conversations in his favourite language. What his real name was we have failed to discover. The loss of his eye had obtained for him in the navy the name of Blind Bob. In his native city this was Italianised into Blindi Bobi. But Bobi was by no means blind of the other eye. It was like seven binocular glasses rolled into one telescope. Once he had unfortunately brought it to bear on the Minister of Marine with such a concentrated stare that he, being also blind of an eye, regarded it as a personal allusion thereto, and never forgave Blindi Bobi.
“This is the second time,” said Omar, when the culprit was brought before him, “that I have caught you interfering with the slaves.”
“Please, sar, hims was werry bad—dyin’, me s’pose.”
“Speak your own tongue, dog, else you shall smart for it,” said the Minister of Marine, with increasing wrath.
The poor interpreter to his Britannic Majesty’s navy repeated his words in the Lingua Franca, but Omar, again interrupting him, ordered the sbirro to take him off and give him the bastinado.
“And have a care, Blindi,” added Omar, observing that the interpreter was about to speak; “if you say that you are under the protection of the British consul I’ll have you flayed alive.—Off with him!”