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Alexander and I, David Forsyth, listened with eyes popping. Orphans we were, adopted by Dr. Eccleston, our mother's rector. My father—as brave a sailor as ever drew breath, Commodore Barney often assured us—had been killed on board the commodore's schooner Hyder Ally, while protecting the shipping in the Delaware River from British frigates during the Revolutionary War. My mother, while father was at sea, had helped to nurse the sick people of Baltimore, and had herself died of the pestilence. Dr. Eccleston, a widower, assumed the care of Alexander and myself.

Alexander, springing up like Jack's bean-vine, yet growing in brawn and manliness as his height increased, was my elder by a number of years. He was much taller than I, yet I was growing too and had hopes of reaching, by the time I was sixteen, the chalk mark on our wall that showed Alexander to be five feet, ten inches high.

It was on a dock in Baltimore that this talk took place. The Egyptian Murad had come to our city from Washington. What his business was no one could tell. Some said that he was a Turkish diplomat. Others said that he was a spy for the Barbary rulers. He attended services at the rector's church, and had told someone that he was a native of Alexandria, Egypt. He had embraced the Christian religion, he said, and had been so persecuted by the indignant Moslems that he had left Egypt for America. He appeared to have plenty of means, and, because there was such an air of romance about him, the people of Baltimore accepted him without much questioning, and were, indeed, rather proud that they had a man of mystery among them.