t beat through, with
a channel so deep, that the lead could never reach to the bottom, and
the passage was land-locked the whole way, so that the wind might veer
round to every point in the compass, and blow hurricanes from them
all, and yet it could never raise a dangerous sea in that channel.
What did the crew of that distressed ship do, when Jesus showed them
his chart, and gave them all the bearings? They laughed at him, and
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
business. At four o'clock dinner was usually served in the airy
vestibule of the embassy villa, and with the occasional accession of
other members of the diplomatic corps we usually formed a large
party. A couple of hours before sunset a caique, which from its size
might have been the galley of a doge, was in waiting, and Lady C----
sometimes took us to a favourite wooded hill o