inherit those charms from their ancestors by right of blood, we may
not say; but from the farthest dates, it has ever supplied the
Sultan and his people with the lovely beings who have rendered of
the harems of the Mussulmen so celebrated for the charms they
enshrine. Its daughters have been n the mothers of the highest
dignitaries of the courts, and Sultan Mahomet himself was born of a
Circassian mother.

Unendowed with mental culture, Providence has seemed, in a degree,
to compensate to the girls of Circassia for want of intellectual
brilliancy, by rendering them physically beautiful almost beyond
description. No wonder, then, educated, or rather uneducated as they
are, that the visions of their childhood, the dreams of their
girlish days, and even the aspirations of their riper years, should
be in the anticipation of a life of independence, luxury and love,
in those fairy-like homes that skirt the Bosphorus at
Constantinople.

Being from their earliest childhood taught by their parents to look
upon this destiny as an enviable one, these fair girls do not fail
to appreciate and fully realize the captivating charms that Heaven
has so liberally endowed them with, and wait with trembling breasts
and hopeful hearts for the period when they shall change the humble
scenes of their existence, from the long and rugged ravines of the
Caucasus, for the glittering and gaudy palaces of the Mussulmen, in
the Valley of Sweet Waters, or on the banks of the Golden Horn.

In former years, the Trebizond merchantman took on board his cargo
of young and lovely Circassians, and navigated the Black Sea with a
flowing sheet and a flag flying at his peak, which told his business