eed that would suit Arthur's Table; but in Pera, I avow, he made me
swear hard, and if he would just have set his heel on his Claude glass,
cursed the Turks, and growled refreshingly, I should have loved him
better. He was philosophic and he was poetic; and the combination of
temperaments lifted him in a mortifying altitude above ordinary
humanity, that was baked, broiled, grumbling, savage, bitten, fleeced,
and holding its own against miserable rats, Greeks, and Bono Johnnies,
with an Aristides thieving its last shirt, and a Pisistratus getting
drunk at its case-bottle! That sublime serenity of his in Pera ended in
making me unholy and ungenerous; if he would but have sworn once at the
confounded country, I should have borne it, but he never did, and I
longed to see him out of temper, I pined and thirsted to get him
disenchanted. "_Tout vient a point, a qui sait attendre_," they say; a
motto, by the way, that might be written over the Horse Guards for the
comfort of gloomy souls, when, in the words of the Psalmist, "Promotion
cometh neither from the south, nor from the east, nor from the
west"--by which lament one might conclude David of Israel to have been a
sufferer by the Purchase-system!

"Delicious!" said Sir Galahad, sending a whiff of Turkish tobacco into
the air one morning after exercise, when he and I, having ridden out a
good many miles along the Sweet Waters, turned the horses loose, bought
some grapes and figs of an old Turk, dispossessed him of his bit of
cocoa-matting, and flung ourselves under a plane-tree. And the fellow
looked round him through his race-glass at the cypress woods, the
mosques and minarets, the almond thickets, the "soft creamy distance,"
as he called it in his _argot d'atelier_, and the Greek fishermen near,
drawing up a net full of silvery prismatic fishes, with a relish
absolutely exasperating. Exasperating--when the sun was broiling one's
brain through the linen, and there wasn't a drop of Bass or soda and B
to be got for love or money, and one thought thirstily of days at home
in England, with the birds whirring up from the stubble in the cool
morning, and the cold punch uncorked for luncheon, under the home woods
fringing the open.

"One wants Hunt to catch that bit of color," murmured Sir Galahad,
luxuriously eying a mutilated Janissary's tomb covered with scarlet
creepers.

"Hunt be hanged!" said I (meaning no disrespect to that eminent
Pre-Raphaelite, whose "Light of the Wo