with one Jesus, a pilot, on board.  The captain hailed him, and he answered that he knew a fair way to the port in question.  He pointed out to them an opening in the rocks, which the largest ship might beat through, with a channel so deep, that the lead could never reach to the bottom, and the passage was land-locked the whole way, so that the wind might veer round to every point in the compass, and blow hurricanes from them all, and yet it could never raise a dangerous sea in that channel.  What did the crew of that distressed ship do, when Jesus showed them his chart, and gave them all the bearings?  They laughed at him, and threw his chart back in his face.  He find a channel where they could not!  Impossible; and on they sailed in their own course, and everyone of them perished.”

At Smyrna, I signalized my return to the land of the Franks, by ordering a beef-steak, and a bottle of porter, and bespeaking the paper from a gentleman in drab leggings, who had come from Manchester to look after the affairs of a commercial house, in which he or his employers were involved.  He wondered that a hotel in the Ottoman empire should be so unlike one in Europe, and asked me, “If the inns down in the country were as good as this.”

As for Constantinople, I refer all readers to the industry and accuracy of Mr. White, who might justly have terminated his volumes with the Oriental epistolary phrase, “What more can I write?” Mr. White is not a mere sentence balancer, but belongs to the guild of bona fide Oriental travellers.

In summer, all Pera is on the Bosphorus:  so I jumped into a caique, and rowed up to Buyukdere.  On the threshold of the villa of the British embassy, I met A——­, the prince of attaches, who led me to a beautiful little kiosk, on the extremity of a garden, and there installed me in his fairy abode of four small rooms, which embraced a view like that of Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore; here books, the piano, the narghile, and the parterre of flowers, relieved the drudgery of his Eastern diplomacy.  Lord N——­, Mr. H——­, and Mr. T——­, the other attaches, lived in a house at the other end of the garden.

I here spent a week of delightful repose.  The mornings were occupied ad libitum, the gentlemen of the embassy being overwhelmed with business.  At four o’clock dinner was usually served in the airy vestibule of the embassy villa, and with the occasional accession of other members of the diplomatic corps we usually formed a large party.  A couple of hours before sunset a caique, which from its size might have been the galley of a doge, was in waiting, and Lady C——­ sometimes took us to a favourite wooded hill or bower-grown creek in the Paradise-like environs, while a small musical party in the evening terminated each day.  One of the attaches of the Russian embassy, M. F——­, is the favorite dilettante of Buyukdere; he has one of the finest voices I ever heard, and frequently reminded me of the easy humour and sonorous profundity of Lablache.