Abyssinians, and Giaours, and Vechabites, Bedouins, and Cophs. But all
that kind of animal is very uninteresting, and I was glad enough to
embark on a Genoese polacca which was loading for the Ionian Islands
with gunpowder and munitions for Ali de Tebelen. You know, don't you,
that the British sell powder and munitions of war to all the world,
--Turks, Greeks, and the devil, too, if the devil has money? From Zante
we were to skirt the coasts of Greece and tack about, on and off. Now
it happens that my name of Georges is famous in that country. I am,
such as you see me, the grandson of the famous Czerni-Georges who made
war upon the Porte, and, instead of crushing it, as he meant to do,
got crushed himself. His son took refuge in the house of the French
consul at Smyrna, and he afterwards died in Paris, leaving my mother
pregnant with me, his seventh child. Our property was all stolen by
friends of my grandfather; in fact, we were ruined. My mother, who
lived on her diamonds, which she sold one by one, married, in 1799, my
step-father, Monsieur Yung, a purveyor. But my mother is dead, and I
have quarrelled with my step-father, who, between ourselves, is a
blackguard; he is still alive, but I never see him. That's why, in
despair, left all to myself, I went off to the wars as a private in
1813. Well, to go back to the time I returned to Greece; you wouldn't
believe with what joy old Ali Tebelen received the grandson of
Czerni-Georges. Here, of course, I call myself simply Georges. The
pacha gave me a harem--"

"You have had a harem?" said Oscar.

"Were you a pacha with _many_ tails?" asked Mistigris.

"How is it that you don't know," replied Georges, "that only the
Sultan makes pachas, and that my friend Tebelen (for we were as