em, we loosened rein and sped away at full gallop
over the hot, white hills. In dashing down a stony rise, the ambitious
donkey, who was doing his best to keep up with the horses, fell, hurling
Master Picciotto over his head. The boy was bruised a little, but set his
teeth together and showed no sign of pain, mounted again, and followed
us. The Gardens of Babala are a wilderness of fruit-trees, like those of
Damascus. Signor P.'s country-house is buried in a wild grove of apricot,
fig, orange, and pomegranate-trees. A large marble tank, in front of the
open, arched _liwan_, supplies it with water. We mounted to the flat roof,
and watched the sunset fade from the beautiful landscape. Beyond the
bowers of dazzling greenness which surrounded us, stretched the wide, gray
hills; the minarets of Aleppo, and the walls of its castled mount shone
rosily in the last rays of the sun; an old palace of the Pashas, with the
long, low barracks of the soldiery, crowned the top of a hill to the
north; dark, spiry cypresses betrayed the place of tombs; and, to the
west, beyond the bare red peak of Mount St. Simon, rose the faint blue
outline of Giaour Dagh, whose mural chain divides Syria from the plains of
Cilicia. As the twilight deepened over the scene, there came a long,
melodious cry of passion and of sorrow from the heart of a starry-flowered
pomegranate tree in the garden. Other voices answered it from the gardens
around, until not one, but fifty nightingales charmed the repose of the
hour. They vied with each other in their bursts of passionate music. Each
strain soared over the last, or united with others, near and far, in a
chorus of the divinest pathos--an expression of sweet, unutterable,
unquenchable longing. It was an ecstasy, yet a pain, to listen. "Away!"
said Jean Paul to Music: "thou tellest me of that which I have not, and
never can have--which I forever seek, and never find!"

But space fails me to describe half the incidents of our stay in Aleppo.
There are two things peculiar to the city, however, which I must not omit
mentioning. One is the Aleppo Button, a singular ulcer, which attacks
every person born in the city, and every stranger who spends more than a
month there. It can neither be prevented nor cured, and always lasts for a
year. The inhabitants almost invariably have it on the face--either on the
cheek, forehead, or tip of the nose--where it often leaves an indelible
and disfiguring scar. Strangers, on the c