His father had died the day before.

The weather was stormy, and the surf on the shore was heavy, and thus it chanced that, even while the crazy old packet on which he sailed lay all day beating about the bay, in fear of being dashed on to the ruins of the mole, his father's body was being buried in the little Jewish cemetery outside the eastern walls, and his cousins, and cousins' cousins, to the fifth degree, without loss of time or waste of sentiment, were busily dividing his inheritance among them.
Next day, as his father's heir, he claimed from the Moorish court the restitution of his father's substance.

But his cousins made the Kadi, the judge, a present of a hundred dollars, and he was declared to be an impostor, who could not establish his identity.

Producing his father's letter which had summoned him from London, he appealed from the Kadi to the Aolama, men wise in the law, who acted as referees in disputed cases; but it was decided that as a Jew he had no right in Mohammedan law to offer evidence in a civil court.

He laid his case before the British Consul, but was found to have no claim to English intervention, being a subject of the Sultan both by birth and parentage.