Seite:Marsh Wolfe of the knoll.djvu/25

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TUNIS-THE-WHITE.

The victors towards the Casbah* press,
Cheered by the joyful populace.
Only last moon, like birds of prey,
On rapid wing they swept away.
And, as if gifted with the same
Mysterious sense that guideth them
Unfailing where their victim lies.
Sudden as bolt from the clear skies,
They lighted on the Franks too near
A Christian shore to dream of fear.

Their chieftain boasts that he is come
Of the great line of Khair-ed-deen,^†

  * The Casbah is a castellated fortress at Tunis, adjacent to which is the
palace of the Bey, Dar el Bey, and it gives name to a public square called
the "Square of the Casbah."
  ^† Khair-ed-deen, the Excellence of the Religion [of Islam] generally
known to Europeans by the name of Barbarossa, was a native of Mytilene,
and of Moslem birth and education, as appears by his own autobiography,
and not a renegade as he has usually been represented. He was the Nel-
son of the Ottoman marine in the sixteenth century, and conquered for the
Porte the regencies of Algiers and Tunis. No Turkish maritime com-
mander has ever made himself so formidable to the Franks, and the whole
coast of Spain and Italy was in a perpetual state of alarm while he was at
the head of the Ottoman navy.