s in the fortune of war: but I confess that Pera put me fairly
out of patience, specially when a certain trusty friend of mine, who has
no earthly fault, that I wot of, except that of perpetually looking at
life through a Claude glass (which is the most aggravating opticism to a
dispassionate and unblinded mind that the world holds), _would_ poetize
upon it, or at least on the East in general, which came pretty much to
the same thing.

The sun poured down on me till (conscience, probably) I remembered the
scriptural threat to the wicked, "their brains shall boil in their
skulls like pots;"--Sir Galahad, as I will call him, would murmur to
himself, with his cheroot in his teeth, Manfred's _salut_ to the sun,
looking as lovingly at it as any eagle. Mosquitoes reduced me to the
very borders of madness,--Sir Galahad would placidly remark, how
Buckland would revel here in all those gorgeous beetles. A Greek told
crackers till I had to double-thong him like a puppy,--Sir Galahad would
shout to me to let the fellow alone, he looked so deuced picturesque, he
must have him for a study. I made myself wretched in a ticklish caique,
the size of a cockle-shell, where, when one was going full harness to
the Great Effendi's, it was a moral impossibility to be doubled without
one's sash swinging into the water, one's sword sticking over the side,
and the liveliest sensation of cramp pervading one's body,--Sir Galahad,
blandly indifferent, would discourse, with superb Ruskin obscurity, of
"tone," and "coloring," and "harmonized light," while he looked down the
Golden Horn, for he was a little Art-mad, and painted so well that if
he had been a professional, the hanging committee would have shut him
out to a certainty.

Now he was a good fellow, a _beau sabreur_, who had fetched some superb
back strokes in the battery at Balaclava, who could send a line
spinning, and land his horse in a gentleman riders' race, and pot the
big game, and lead the first flight over Northamptonshire doubles at
home, as well as a man wants to do; but I put it to any dispassionate
person, whether this persistent poetism of his, flying in the face of
facts and of fleas, was not enough to make anybody swear in that
mosquito-purgatorio of Pera?

Sir Galahad was a capital fellow, and the men would have gone after him
to the death; the fair, frank, handsome face, a little womanish perhaps,
was very pleasant to look at, and he got the Victoria not long ago for a
d