the picture; but the house and stable, which had resounded with the good-humoured laugh of the master, and the neighing of the well-fed little stud (for horse-flesh was the weak side of our Esculapius), were tenantless, ruinous, and silent.  The doctor had died in the interval at Widdin, in the service of Hussein Pasha.  I mechanically withdrew, abstracted from external nature by the “memory of joys that were past, pleasant and mournful to the soul.”

I then took a Turkish bath; but the inferiority of those in Belgrade to similar luxuries in Constantinople, Damascus, and Cairo, was strikingly apparent on entering.  The edifice and the furniture were of the commonest description.  The floors of the interior of brick instead of marble, and the plaster and the cement of the walls in a most defective state.  The atmosphere in the drying room was so cold from the want of proper windows and doors, that I was afraid lest I should catch a catarrh.  The Oriental bath, when paved with fine grained marbles, and well appointed in the departments of linen, sherbet, and narghile, is a great luxury; but the bath at Belgrade was altogether detestable.  In the midst of the drying business a violent dispute broke out between the proprietor and an Arnaout, whom the former styled a cokoshary, or hen-eater, another term for a robber; for when lawless Arnaouts arrive in a village, after eating up half the contents of the poultry-yard, they demand a tribute in the shape of compensation for the wear and tear of their teeth while consuming the provisions they have forcibly exacted.

CHAPTER VI.

Europeanization of Belgrade.—­Lighting and Paving.—­Interior of the Fortress—­Turkish Pasha.—­Turkish Quarter.—­Turkish Population.—­Panorama of Belgrade—­Dinner party given by the Prince.

The melancholy I experienced in surveying the numerous traces of desolation in Turkey was soon effaced at Belgrade.  Here all was life and activity.  It was at the period of my first visit, in 1839, quite an oriental town; but now the haughty parvenu spire of the cathedral throws into the shade the minarets of the mosques, graceful even in decay.  Many of the bazaar-shops have been fronted and glazed.  The oriental dress has become much rarer; and houses several stories high, in the German fashion, are springing up everywhere.  But in two important particulars Belgrade is as oriental as if it were situated on the Tigris or Barrada—­lighting and paving.  It is impossible in wet weather to pay a couple of visits without coming home up to the ankles in mud; and at night all locomotion without a lantern is impossible.  Belgrade, from its elevation, could be most easily lighted with gas, and at a very small expense; as even if there be no coal in Servia, there is abundance of it at Moldava, which is on the Danube between Belgrade and Orsova; that is to say, considerably above the Iron Gates.  I make this remark, not so much to reproach my Servian friends with backwardness, but to stimulate them to all easily practicable improvements.