trade and commerce.  Out of that five millions the small tyrant tried to keep an army of ten thousand men, pay all the hundreds of useless Grand Equerries in Waiting, First Grooms of the Bedchamber, Lord High Chancellors of the Exploded Exchequer, and all the other absurdities which these puppy-kingdoms indulge in, in imitation of the great monarchies; and in addition he set about building a white marble palace to cost about five millions itself.  The result was, simply:  ten into five goes no times and none over.  All these things could not be done with five millions, and Otho fell into trouble.

The Greek throne, with its unpromising adjuncts of a ragged population of ingenious rascals who were out of employment eight months in the year because there was little for them to borrow and less to confiscate, and a waste of barren hills and weed-grown deserts, went begging for a good while.  It was offered to one of Victoria’s sons, and afterwards to various other younger sons of royalty who had no thrones and were out of business, but they all had the charity to decline the dreary honor, and veneration enough for Greece’s ancient greatness to refuse to mock her sorrowful rags and dirt with a tinsel throne in this day of her humiliation—­till they came to this young Danish George, and he took it.  He has finished the splendid palace I saw in the radiant moonlight the other night, and is doing many other things for the salvation of Greece, they say.

We sailed through the barren Archipelago, and into the narrow channel they sometimes call the Dardanelles and sometimes the Hellespont.  This part of the country is rich in historic reminiscences, and poor as Sahara in every thing else.  For instance, as we approached the Dardanelles, we coasted along the Plains of Troy and past the mouth of the Scamander; we saw where Troy had stood (in the distance,) and where it does not stand now—­a city that perished when the world was young.  The poor Trojans are all dead, now.  They were born too late to see Noah’s ark, and died too soon to see our menagerie.  We saw where Agamemnon’s fleets rendezvoused, and away inland a mountain which the map said was Mount Ida.  Within the Hellespont we saw where the original first shoddy contract mentioned in history was carried out, and the “parties of the second part” gently rebuked by Xerxes.  I speak of the famous bridge of boats which Xerxes ordered to be built over the narrowest part of the Hellespont (where it is only two or three miles wide.) A moderate gale destroyed the flimsy structure, and the King, thinking that to publicly rebuke the contractors might have a good effect on the next set, called them out before the army and had them beheaded.  In the next ten minutes he let a new contract for the bridge.  It has been observed by ancient writers that the second bridge was a very good bridge.  Xerxes crossed his host of five millions of men on it, and if it had not been purposely destroyed, it