are many mosques and tombs, which were once imposing specimens of Saracenic art; but now, split and shivered by wars and earthquakes, are slowly tumbling into utter decay.  On the south-eastern side of the city, its chalk foundations have been hollowed into vast, arched caverns, which extend deep into the earth.  Pillars have been left at regular intervals, to support the masses above, and their huge, dim labyrinths resemble the crypts of some great cathedral.  They are now used as rope-walks, and filled with cheerful workmen.

Our last excursion was to a country-house of Signor di Picciotto, in the Gardens of Babala, about four miles from Aleppo.  We set out in the afternoon on our Arabians, with our host’s son on a large white donkey of the Baghdad breed.  Passing the Turkish cemetery, where we stopped to view the tomb of General Bem, we loosened rein and sped away at full gallop over the hot, white hills.  In dashing down a stony rise, the ambitious donkey, who was doing his best to keep up with the horses, fell, hurling Master Picciotto over his head.  The boy was bruised a little, but set his teeth together and showed no sign of pain, mounted again, and followed us.  The Gardens of Babala are a wilderness of fruit-trees, like those of Damascus.  Signor P.’s country-house is buried in a wild grove of apricot, fig, orange, and pomegranate-trees.  A large marble tank, in front of the open, arched liwan, supplies it with water.  We mounted to the flat roof, and watched the sunset fade from the beautiful landscape.  Beyond the bowers of dazzling greenness which surrounded us, stretched the wide, gray hills; the minarets of Aleppo, and the walls of its castled mount shone rosily in the last rays of the sun; an old palace of the Pashas, with the long, low barracks of the soldiery, crowned the top of a hill to the north; dark, spiry cypresses betrayed the place of tombs; and, to the west, beyond the bare red peak of Mount St. Simon, rose the faint blue outline of Giaour Dagh, whose mural chain divides Syria from the plains of Cilicia.  As the twilight deepened over the scene, there came a long, melodious cry of passion and of sorrow from the heart of a starry-flowered pomegranate tree in the garden.  Other voices answered it from the gardens around, until not one, but fifty nightingales charmed the repose of the hour.  They vied with each other in their bursts of passionate music.  Each strain soared over the last, or united with others, near and far, in a chorus of the divinest pathos—­an expression of sweet, unutterable, unquenchable longing.  It was an ecstasy, yet a pain, to listen.  “Away!” said Jean Paul to Music:  “thou tellest me of that which I have not, and never can have—­which I forever seek, and never find!”