hour, and suddenly rounding a shoulder of the hill, lo, the Bay of Eleusis! Here we have all the grandeur of the sea united with the attractiveness of a mountain-girt inland lake. The stripe of land along the coast, so renowned in ancient times for its fertility, forms a remarkably beautiful, semi-circular plain, shut in by gently rising hills. The bay sweeps inwards in one majestic unbroken curve; on the north side rise the terraced heights of Salamis; and at the western extremity we see the glittering roofs of Eleusis ... Then, for some time, we traverse a desolate plain with low underwood and wild olive trees, and at length espy Megara, a little cheerful-looking town, not far from the sea, with flat-roofed houses rising in terraces up the side of a hill cloven at the summit into two separate peaks, each of which was formerly crowned by an Acropolis...The road gradually descends. A pretty valley, bounded on its east side by a continuous chain of undulating hills, conducts us to the isthmus of Corinth. Here and there are shady groups of trees, everywhere a profusion of dwarf firs, myrtles, and oleanders; but nowhere a trace of human industry ... On the whole road from Megara to the isthmus there is but one small hamlet, Kinetta, consisting of four troglodytic huts. The Corinth of to-day is but a small town, just struggling into importance, with a few thousand inhabitants. Only seven columns of a very old Doric temple remain to attest its ancient magnifiHettner.

cence.

CONSTANTINOPLE.

EVEN if we don't take a part in the chant about “Mosques and Minarets," we can still yield praises to Stamboul. We can chant about the harbor; we can say and sing that nowhere else does the sea come so home to a city: there are no pebbly shores, no sand bars, no slimy river-beds, no black canals, no locks nor docks to divide the very heart of the place from the deep waters... If being in the noisiest mart of Stamboul, you would stroll to the quiet side of the way amidst those cypresses opposite, you will cross the fathomless Bosphorus; if you would go from your hotel to the Bazaars, you must pass by the bright blue pathway of the Golden Horn, that can carry a thousand sail of the line. You are accustomed to the gondolas that glide among the palaces of St. Mark, but here at Stamboul it is a hundred-and-twenty-gun ship that meets you in the street. Venice strains out from the steadfast land, and in old times would send forth the Chief of the State to woo and wed the reluctant sea; but the stormy bride of the Doge is the

bowing slave of the Sultan: she comes to his feet with the treasures of the world; she bears him from palace to palace; by some unfailing witchcraft, she entices the breezes to follow her*, and fan the pale cheek of her lord; she lifts his armed navies to the very gates of his garden; she watches the walls of his Seraglio; she stifles the intrigues of his Ministers; she quiets the scandals of his Court; she extinguishes his rivals, and hushes his naughty wives all one by one. So vast are the wonders of the Deep!,

All the while that I stayed at Constantinople the plague was prevailing, but not with any violence; its presence, however, lent a mysterious and exciting, though not very pleasant, interest to my first knowledge of a great oriental city; it gave tone and color to all I saw and all I felt-a tone and a color sombre enough, but true, and well befitting the dreary monuments of past power and splendor... With all that is most truly oriental in its character the plague is associated: it dwells with the faithful in the holiest quarters of their city. The coats and the hats of Pera are held to be nearly as innocent of infection as they are ugly in shape and fashion; but the rich furs and the costly shawls, the broidered slippers and the goldladen saddle-cloths, the fragrance of burning aloes and the rich aroma of patchouli-these are the signs that mark the familiar home of plague... You go out from your queenly London, the centre of the greatest and strongest amongst all earthly dominions-you go out thence, and travel on to the capital of an Eastern Prince: you find but a waning power, and a faded splendor, that inclines you to laugh and mock; but let the Angel of Plague be at hand, and he, more mighty than armies, more terrible than Suleyman in his glory, can restore such pomp and majesty to the weakness of the imperial city, that if, when HE is there, you must still go prying amongst the shades of this dead empire, at least you will tread the path with seemly reverence and awe.

The Osmanlees speak well. In countries civilised according to the European plan, the work of trying to persuade tribunals is almost all performed by a set of men, who seldom do anything else; but in Turkey, this division of labor has never taken place, and every man is his own advocate. The importance of the rhetorical art is immense, for a bad speech may endanger the property of the speaker, as well as the soles of his feet, and the free enjoyment of his throat. So it results that

*There is almost always a breeze either from the Marmora, or from the Black Sea, that passes along the course of the Bosphorus.

most of the Turks whom one sees have a lawyer-like habit of speaking connectedly and at length... Even the treaties continually going on at the bazaar for the buying and selling of the merest trifles are carried on by speechifying, rather than by mere colloquies, and the eternal uncertainty as to the market value of things in constant sale gives room enough for discussion. The seller is for ever demanding a price immensely beyond that for which he sells at last, and so occasions unspeakable disgust in many Englishmen, who cannot see why an honest dealer should ask more for his goods than he will really take the truth is, however, that an ordinary tradesman of Constantinople has no other way of finding out the fair market value of his property... His difficulty is easily shown by comparing the mechanism of the commercial system in Turkey with that of our own people. In England, or in any other great mercantile country, the bulk of the things bought and sold goes through the hands of a wholesale dealer, and it is he who higgles and bargains with an entire nation of purchasers, by entering into treaty with retail sellers. The labor of making a few large contracts is sufficient to give a clue for finding the fair market value of the goods sold throughout the country; but in Turkey, from the primitive habits of the people, and partly from the absence of great capital and great credit, the importing merchant, the warehouseman, the wholesale dealer, the retail dealer, and the shopman, are all one person... Old Moostapha, or Abdallah, or Hadgi Mohamed waddles up from the water's edge with a small packet of merchandise, which he has bought out of a Greek brigantine, and when at last he has reached his nook in the bazaar, he puts his goods before the counter, and himself upon it; then laying fire to his tchibouque, he "sits in permanence," and patiently waits to obtain "the best price that can be got in an open market." This is his fair right as a seller, but he has no means of finding out what that best price is, except by actual experiment... He cannot know the intensity of the demand, or the abundance of the supply, otherwise than by the offers which may be made for his little bundle of goods; so he begins by asking a perfectly hopeless price, and then descends the ladder until he meets a purchaser. This is the struggle which creates the continual occasion for debate... The vendor perceiving that the unfolded merchandise has caught the eye of a possible purchaser, commences his opening speech. He covers his bristling broadcloths and his meagre silks with the golden broidery of oriental praises, and as he talks, along with the slow and graceful waving of his arms, he lifts his undulating periods, up

holds, and poises them well till they have gathered their weight and their strength, and then hurls them bodily forward, with grave, momentous swing... The possible purchaser listens to the whole speech with deep and serious attention; but when it is over his turn arrives; he elaborately endeavors to show why he ought not to buy the things at a price twenty times larger than their value: bystanders attracted to the debate take a part in it as independent members-the vendor is heard in reply, and coming down with his price, furnishes the materials for a new debate... Sometimes, however, the dealer, if he is a very pious Mussulman, and sufficiently rich to hold back his ware, will take a more dignified part, maintaining a kind of judicial gravity, and receiving the applicants who come to his stall, as if they were rather suitors than customers. He will quietly hear to the end some long speech, that concludes with an offer, and will answer it all with that bold monosyllable "Yok", which means distinctly "No."

I caught one glimpse of the old Heathen world. My habits of studying military subjects had been hardening my heart against Poetry. For ever staring at the flames of battle, I had blinded myself to the lesser and finer lights that are shed from the imaginations of men... In my reading at this time, I delighted to follow from out of Arabian sands the feet of the armed believers, and to stand in the broad manifest storm-tract of Tartar devastation; and thus, though surrounded at Constantinople, by scenes of much interest to the "classical scholar," I had cast aside their associations like an old Greek grammar, and turned my face to the "shining Orient," forgetful of old Greece, and all the pure wealth she left to this matter-of-fact ridden world... But it happened to me one day to mount the high grounds overhanging the streets of Pera. I sated my eyes with the pomps of the city, and its crowded waters, and then I looked over where Scutari lay half veiled in her mournful cypresses. I looked yet farther, and higher, and saw in the heavens a silvery cloud that stood fast and still against the breeze: it was pure and dazzling white as might be the veil of Cytherea, yet touched with such fire, as though from beneath the loving eyes of an immortal were shining through and through. I knew the bearing, but had enormously misjudged its distance and underrated its height, and so it was as a sign and a testimony-almost as a call from the neglected gods, that now I saw and acknowledged the snowy crown of the Mysian Olympus! Eöthen.

THE RAMAZAN.

...

THE more the intercourse between the different nations exerts its assimilating influence, the more interesting become the remaining traces of a distinct national and social life. In Europe this assimilating tendency has spread so far, that very little indeed remains; and railways and steamers efface more and more even the few traces which have been left hitherto, so that a man will soon be able to go to one end of Europe to the other without finding any difference in the appearance of the different countries In Turkey this cosmopolitan tendency has not yet succeeded so completely. There is, indeed, a rage in Stamboul for everything which is French. The picturesque Oriental costume is more and more giving way to ugly, straight-collared coats, and broad strapped trousers, the best specimens of which would disgrace even the shops of the Temple at Paris... The beautiful ceilings carved in wood are disappearing in favor of wretchedly daubed flowers and trees; the comfortable divans running all round the walls, are giving way to straight-backed, uneasy chairs. But these innovations are scarcely known out of Stamboul, and even in the capital, there is a time when a kind of reaction takes place against this tendency, and Oriental life seems to revive for a time... This time is that of the Ramazan, with its days of fasts and its nights of feasts. Then everybody returns to the old style of living; knives and forks, tables and chairs, plates and napkins, are discarded, and all eat in the patriarchal way, out of one dish with their fingers... There are even people who abandon the raki bottle during that time, and go back again to the pure element. The mosques begin again to exert their attractions; and many a man you may see there, bowing down, who during eleven months of the year is making philosophical comments about the Koran.

This is, therefore, the most interesting time for a European, who can get by a stroll through the streets, more insight into the character of Mohammedan life than by the study of volumes. ... Although the external appearance of the people has been changed from what it was when Turkish dignitaries rode about in colossal turbans and richly embroidered kaftans, when the only carriage seen was the gaudily painted araba, with milkwhite oxen, when swaggering Janissaries and Spahis made themselves conspicuous, and when the old ruins, through which you now walk, were in their prime,-enough still remains to give the whole picture that strange mysterious coloring which we connect in our minds with the idea of the East.