This disease (says Dr. Winterbottom) affects the natives of Africa as strongly as it does those of Switzerland; it is even more violent in its effects on the Africans, and often impels them to dreadful acts of suicide.  Sometimes it plunges them into a deep melancholy, which induces the unhappy sufferers to end a miserable existence by a more tedious, though equally certain method, that of dirt eating.

Such is the powerful influence of the lore of one’s native country.

P.T.W.

* * * * *

SINGULAR CUSTOM OF THE SULTAN OF TURKEY.

(For the Mirror.)

After the opening of the Bairam,[2] a ceremony among the Turks, attended with more than ordinary magnificence; the Sultan, accompanied by the Grand Signior and all the principal officers of state, goes to exhibit himself to the people in a kiosk, or tent near the seraglio point, seated on a sofa of silver, brought out for the occasion.  It is a very large, wooden couch covered with thick plates of massive silver, highly burnished, and there is little doubt from the form of it, and the style in which it is ornamented that it constituted part of the treasury of the Greek emperors when Constantinople was taken by the Turks.

INA.

    [2] The Bairam of the Turks answers to our Easter, as their Ramadan
    does to our Lent.

* * * * *

THE SKETCH-BOOK

* * * * *

EL BORRACHO.[3]

    [3] The Drunkard; the Spanish origin of this title is endeavoured to
    to be recognised in its title.

Not long since, a couple resided in the suburbs of Madrid, named Perez and Juana Donilla; and a happy couple they might have been, had not Perez contracted a sad habit of drinking, which became more and more confirmed after every draught of good wine; and such draughts were certainly more frequent than his finances were in a state to allow.  Night after night was spent at the tavern; fairly might he be said to swallow all that he earned by his daily labour; and Juana and himself (fortunately they had no children to maintain) must have been reduced to absolute mendicity, but for the exemplary conduct of the former, who contrived to support her spouse and herself upon the scanty produce of her unwearied industry.  If ever a sentiment of gratitude for undeserved favours animated the bosom of Perez Donilla, he took, it must be confessed, a strange method of declaring it; not only would he, upon his return from his lawless carousals, grumble over that humble fare, the possession of which at all he ought to have considered as scarce less than a miracle, but, in his madness, unmerciful strappings were sure to be the portion of his miserable wife.  Poor Juana bore these cruelties with a patience that ought to have canonized her under the title of St.