Syria with the unconcerned indifference of beings to whom not only
a portion of the world's territory, but the whole world itself,
belongs,--and soon there will not be an inch of ground left on the
narrow extent of our poor planet that has not been trodden by the
hasty, scrambling, irreverent footsteps of some one or other of
the ever-prolific, all-spreading English-speaking race.

On his way Alwyn met many of his countrymen,--travellers who, like
himself, had visited the Caucasus and Armenia and were now en
route, some for Damascus, some for Jerusalem and the Holy Land--
others again for Cairo and Alexandria, to depart from thence
homeward by the usual Mediterranean line, . . but among these birds-
of-passage acquaintance he chanced upon none who were going to the
Ruins of Babylon. He was glad of this--for the peculiar nature of
his enterprise rendered a companion altogether undesirable,--and
though on one occasion he encountered a gentleman-novelist with a
note-book, who was exceedingly anxious to fraternize with him and
discover whither he vas bound, he succeeded in shaking off this
would-be incubus at Mosul, by taking him to a wonderful old
library in that city where there were a number of French
translations of Turkish and Syriac romances. Here the gentleman-
novelist straightway ascended to the seventh heaven of plagiarism,
and began to copy energetically whole scenes and descriptive
passages from dead-and-gone authors, unknown to English critics,
for the purpose of inserting them hereafter into his own
"original" work of fiction--and in this congenial occupation he
forgot all about the "dark handsome man, with the wide brows of a
Marc Antony and the lips of a Catullus," as he had already
described Alwyn in the note-book before-mentioned. While in Mosul,
Alwyn himself picked up a curiosity in the way of literature,--a