oard quarter a vast tent afloat, with its rolled up beds, quilts,
counterpanes, washing gear, and all sorts of water-cans, coffee-pots,
and chibouques, with stores of bread, cheese, fruit, and other
provisions for the voyage. In the East, a family cannot move without
its household paraphernalia, but then it requires a slight addition of
furniture and utensils to settle for years in a strange place. The
settlement of a European family requires a thousand et ceteras and
months of installation, but then it is set in motion for the new world
with a few portmanteaus and travelling bags.

Two days and a half of steaming brought us to Rhodes.

An enchanter has waved his wand! in reading of the wondrous world of
the ancients, one feels a desire to get a peep at Rome before its
destruction by barbarian hordes. A leap backwards of half this period
is what one seems to make at Rhodes, a perfectly preserved city and
fortress of the middle ages. Here has been none of the Vandalism of
Vauban, Cohorn, and those mechanical-pated fellows, who, with their
Dutch dyke-looking parapets, made such havoc of donjons and
picturesque turrets in Europe. Here is every variety of mediaeval
battlement; so perfect is the illusion, that one wonders the waiter's
horn should be mute, and the walls devoid of bowman, knight, and
squire.

Two more delightful days of steaming among the Greek Islands now
followed. The heat was moderate, the motion gentle, the sea was liquid
lapis lazuli, and the hundred-tinted islets around us, wrought their
accustomed spell. Surely there is something in climate which creates
permanent abodes of art! The Mediterranean, with its hydrographical
configuration, excluding from its great peninsulas the extremes of
heat and cold, seems destined to nourish the most exquisite sentiment
of the Beautiful. Those brilliant or softly graduated tints invite the
palette, and the cultivation of the graces of the mind, shining with
its aesthetic ray through lineaments thorough-bred from generation to
generation, invites the sculptor to transfer to marble, grace of
contour and elevation of expression. But let us not envy the balmy
South. The Germanic or northern element, if less susceptible of the
beautiful is more masculine, better balanced, less in extremes. It was
this element that struck down the Roman empire, that peoples America
and Australia, and rules India; that exhausted worlds, and then
created new.

The most prominent individu