s, so it must steal into your room,
parching your face, and covering you all over with a clammy stickiness,
through which you may distinctly feel the subdolent shudder of incipient
ague. When he has darkened his room, and spread cool mats on the floor,
the poor Smyrniot has nothing farther that he can do. And if such be the
case of those who dwell within the mansions of Ismir, who have at least
thick walls between them and the sun, what is likely to be the state of
those _disgraziatos_, who people the busy town of ships in the bay?--the
rash men

"--digitos a morte remotos
Quatuor aut septem."

Custom, they say, may bring a man to any thing, as it did M. Chabert to
the power of living in an oven; to which achievement, by the way, I
should not wonder if the first step had been the passing of a hot summer
on board ship in harbour. You may any day see, at some of our gigantic
iron-works, custom bringing men to such a pass, that they can endure to
stand before a fire that would be the death and cooking of an ox. And so
I suppose it was by force of custom that we were able to undergo a style
of thing that ought to have been the stewing of any ordinary flesh and
blood. But it was a stupid and languid life that we were leading,
scarcely venturing on deck even beneath the awning, and not dreaming of
shore except quite in the evening. Sometimes a morning's interest would
be excited by some story of plague in the Lazaretto, and a proposed
adjournment of the ship to Vourlah, to be out of harm's way; and such
speculations, though not exactly pleasurable, were at least
anti-stagnative in character. In any thing like decent weather it is not
bad fun to get down to Vourlah for a time, and to fly from the gaieties
of the metropolis to the pleasures of the _chasse_ at Rabbit Island. It
must ever be soothing to a spirit that has not quite forgotten "the
humanities," to walk upon the turf which witnessed the infant gambols of
Anaxagoras; and besides that, the locality is pretty, and worthy of
being visited on its own account. The town is at the distance of some
miles from the Scala, which last is the grand watering-place for the
ships on this station. Some few years ago, when the two fleets, French
and English, were here, an extempore town was devised on the beach, for
the benefit of the thousand and one hangers-on who are always found in
such neighbourhoods. This was a stretch of luxury on their part; for
generally these nautic