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.