and we talked incessantly, and laughed exhaustingly, and neither one ever knew what the other was driving at.  But it was splendid.  There were twenty people in the set, and the dance was very lively and complicated.  It was complicated enough without me—­with me it was more so.  I threw in a figure now and then that surprised those Russians.  But I have never ceased to think of that girl.  I have written to her, but I can not direct the epistle because her name is one of those nine-jointed Russian affairs, and there are not letters enough in our alphabet to hold out.  I am not reckless enough to try to pronounce it when I am awake, but I make a stagger at it in my dreams, and get up with the lockjaw in the morning.  I am fading.  I do not take my meals now, with any sort of regularity.  Her dear name haunts me still in my dreams.  It is awful on teeth.  It never comes out of my mouth but it fetches an old snag along with it.  And then the lockjaw closes down and nips off a couple of the last syllables—­but they taste good.

Coming through the Dardanelles, we saw camel trains on shore with the glasses, but we were never close to one till we got to Smyrna.  These camels are very much larger than the scrawny specimens one sees in the menagerie.  They stride along these streets, in single file, a dozen in a train, with heavy loads on their backs, and a fancy-looking negro in Turkish costume, or an Arab, preceding them on a little donkey and completely overshadowed and rendered insignificant by the huge beasts.  To see a camel train laden with the spices of Arabia and the rare fabrics of Persia come marching through the narrow alleys of the bazaar, among porters with their burdens, money-changers, lamp-merchants, Al-naschars in the glassware business, portly cross-legged Turks smoking the famous narghili; and the crowds drifting to and fro in the fanciful costumes of the East, is a genuine revelation of the Orient.  The picture lacks nothing.  It casts you back at once into your forgotten boyhood, and again you dream over the wonders of the Arabian Nights; again your companions are princes, your lord is the Caliph Haroun Al Raschid, and your servants are terrific giants and genii that come with smoke and lightning and thunder, and go as a storm goes when they depart!

CHAPTER XXXIX.

We inquired, and learned that the lions of Smyrna consisted of the ruins of the ancient citadel, whose broken and prodigious battlements frown upon the city from a lofty hill just in the edge of the town—­the Mount Pagus of Scripture, they call it; the site of that one of the Seven Apocalyptic Churches of Asia which was located here in the first century of the Christian era; and the grave and the place of martyrdom of the venerable Polycarp, who suffered in Smyrna for his religion some eighteen hundred years ago.

We took little donkeys and started.  We saw Polycarp’s tomb, and then hurried on.