of the ceremony.  The bride shook, and her bracelet fell down.  After the ceremony she received me unveiled.  She was a fine tall dark girl, but not a pretty woman.  From Jaffa I journeyed to Jerusalem, and travelled all through the Holy Land, with a feeling of deep emotion, which was only disturbed by one vexatious incident.  On the day I was to go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a great crowd had got there before me, and a quarrel, which degenerated into a general melee, forthwith arose between Greeks, Jews, and Armenians.  It was only by dint of hard knocks that the Turkish police made way for me to enter the Holy Place, and to crown the scandal, just as I knelt in deep devotion, before the altar, the organ began to play the Marseillaise.  There was yet another episode during my stay at Jerusalem.  The Governor of the Province waited upon me to say he had Mehemet Ali’s orders to place himself at the disposal of the son of the King of France, and to do whatever he desired.  I caught the ball on the hop, and replied he was just in time, for I had just been going to ask his leave to enter the Mosque of Omar, which stands on the site of the ancient Temple of Solomon.  It should be added that this fine mosque, which is next in holiness in Mussulman eyes to that at Mecca, and which is now open to all the world, had at that date never been seen except by the famous traveller Ali Bey.

Governor Hassan Bey tugged his beard when he heard my request, and seemed very much put out indeed.  After a moment’s silence he made up his mind, and said, “Come to-morrow:  I’ll take you there myself.”  The next day I kept my appointment, bringing Bruat and two or three officers who were making the same trip with me.  We entered the mosque, which is really very beautiful, and went all over it.  The Imaums and Softas, the priests and students, had cast horrified glances upon us from the moment of our entry.  Suddenly one of them began to intone in a falsetto voice a sort of Litany, to which the crowd replied in chorus.  Soon the Litany turned into angry shouts, and the crowd, led by an old Negro Imaum, in a yellow robe, who seemed to have worked himself into a perfect paroxysm of fury, rushed at us with threatening gestures.  This was by no means reassuring, but Hassan Bey was equal to the emergency.  Seizing me by the arm, he put me behind him, with Bruat and the other gentlemen grouped round me.  Then he ordered a dozen Kavasses he had brought with him to charge, which they did, laying out heavily with their sticks.  Not content with that, he had the most turbulent of the Softas seized, thrown down at his feet, and beaten without mercy.  The blows hailed down on the poor wretch as if they had been beating a carpet.  This determined attitude cowed the crowd, which fell back to the far end of the mosque, grumbling.  “We will go now,” said the Bey.  Once we were outside, he shut us up in a neighbouring mosque, which was empty, begging us to wait there for him.  Soon