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