Page:Ballantyne--The Pirate City.djvu/64

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THE PIRATE CITY.

tinued the Dey, as coolly as if he had been talking of a silver snuff-box.

Hassan again bowed and smiled, and again had to constrain his countenance to express gratification, though he was not a little disgusted with Achmet's indifference to the captive girls.

Leaving the palace in a state of high indignation, he resolved to sell Angela in the public market, although by so doing he could not hope to gain so much as would have been the case were he to have disposed of her by private bargain. Thus, with strange perversity, does an angry man often stand in the way of his own interests.

We need scarcely say that, when their fate was announced to the unhappy sisters, they were plunged into a state of wild grief, clung to each other's necks, and refused to be separated.

Little did Sidi Hassan care for their grief. He tore them asunder, locked Paulina up with her infant, and led the weeping Angela to the slave-market, which was in the immediate neighbourhood of one of the largest mosques of the city.

This mosque, named Djama Djedid, still stands, under the name of the Mosquée de la Pêcherie, one of the most conspicuous and picturesque buildings in Algiers. It was built in the seventeenth century by a Genoese architect, a slave, who, unfortunately for himself, built it in the form of a cross, for which he