The morning air was clear and cool.  The sun shone brilliantly, and was reflected back with dazzling vividness from long vistas of high white houses, innumerable windows, and gilded balconies.  Theatres, shops, cafes, and hotels not yet opened, lined the great thoroughfares.  Triumphal arches, columns, parks, palaces, and churches succeeded one another in apparently endless succession.  I passed a lofty pillar crowned with a conqueror’s statue—­a palace tragic in history—­a modern Parthenon surrounded by columns, peopled with sculptured friezes, and approached by a flight of steps extending the whole width of the building.  I went in, for the doors had just been opened, and a white-haired Sacristan was preparing the seats for matin service.  There were acolytes decorating the altar with fresh flowers, and early devotees on their knees before the shrine of the Madonna.  The gilded ornaments, the tapers winking in the morning light, the statues, the paintings, the faint clinging odors of incense, the hushed atmosphere, the devotional silence, the marble angels kneeling round the altar, all united to increase my dream of delight.  I gazed and gazed again; wandered round and round; and at last, worn out with excitement and fatigue, sank into a chair in a distant corner of the Church, and fell into a heavy sleep.  How long it lasted I know not; but the voices of the choristers and the deep tones of the organ mingled with my dreams.  When I awoke the last worshippers were departing, the music had died into silence, the wax-lights were being extinguished, and the service was ended.

Again I went out into the streets; but all was changed.  Where there had been the silence of early morning there was now the confusion of a great city.  Where there had been closed shutters and deserted thoroughfares, there was the bustle of life, gayety, business, and pleasure.  The shops blazed with jewels and merchandise; the stonemasons were at work on the new buildings; the lemonade venders, with their gay reservoirs upon their backs, were plying a noisy trade; the bill-stickers were papering boardings and lamp-posts with variegated advertisements; the charlatan, in his gaudy chariot, was selling pencils and penknives to the accompaniment of a hand-organ; soldiers were marching to the clangor of military music; the merchant was in his counting-house, the stock-broker at the Bourse, and the lounger, whose name is Legion, was sitting in the open air outside his favorite cafe, drinking chocolate, and yawning over the Charivari.

I thought I must be dreaming.  I scarcely believed the evidence of my eyes.  Was this Sunday?  Was it possible that in our own little church at home—­in our own little church, where we could hear the birds twittering outside in every interval of the quiet service—­the old familiar faces, row beyond row, were even now upturned in reverent attention to the words of the preacher?  Prince Bedreddin, transported in his sleep to the gates of Damascus, could scarcely have opened his eyes upon a foreign city and a strange people with more incredulous amazement.