University of Virginia Library

THE GIPSY OF SARDIS.

Shelley's Promotheus.

Our tents were pitched in the vestibule of the house
of Crœsus, on the natural terrace which was once the
imperial site of Sardis. A humpbacked Dutch artist,
who had been in the service of Lady Hester Stanhope
as a draughtsman, and who had lingered about between
Jerusalem and the Nile till he was as much at
home in the East as a Hajji or a crocodile; an Englishman
qualifying himself for “The Travellers';”
a Smyrniote merchant in figs and opium; Job Smith
(my inseprable shadow) and myself, composed a
party at this time, (August, 1834), rambling about
Asia Minor in turbans and Turkish saddles, and pitching
our tents, and cooking our pilau, wherever it
pleased Heaven and the inexorable Suridji who was
our guide and caterer.

I thought at the time that I would compound to
abandon all the romance of that renowned spot, for a
clean shirt and something softer than a marble frustrum

for a pillow; but in the distance of memory, and myself
at this present in a deep morocco chair in the
library at “The Travellers',” that same scene in the
ruins of Sardis does not seem destitute of interest.

It was about four in the lazy summer afternoon.
We had arrived at Sardis at mid-day, and after a
quarrel whether we should eat immediately or wait till
the fashionable hour of three, the wooden dish containing
two chickens buried in a tumulus of rice,
shaped (in compliment to the spirit of the spot) like
the Mound of Alyattis in the plain below, was placed
in the centre of a marble pedestal; and with Job and
the Dutchman seated on the prostrate column dislodged
for our benefit, and the remainder of the party squatted
in the high grass, which grew in the royal palace as if
it had no memory of the foot-prints of the Kings of
Lydia, we spooned away at the saturated rice, and
pulled the smothered chickens to pieces with an independence
of knives and forks that was worthy of the
“certain poor man in Attica.” Old Solon himself,
who stood, we will suppose, while reproving the ostentatious
monarch, at the base of that very column now
ridden astride by an inhabitant of a country of which
he never dreamed,—(at least it strikes me there is no
mention of the Yankees in his philosophy,)—the old
greybeard of the Academy himself, I say, would have
been edified at the primitive simplicity of our repast.
The salt (he would have asked if it was Attic) was
contained in a ragged play-bill, which the Dutchman
had purloined as a specimen of modern Greek, from
the side of a house in Corfu; the mustard was in a
cracked powder-horn, which had been slung at the
breast of old Whalley the regicide, in the American
revolution, and which Job had brought from the Green
Mountains, and held, till its present base uses, in religious
veneration; the ham (I should have mentioned

that respectable entremet before) was half enveloped
in a copy of the “Morning Post;” and the bread,
which had been seven days out from Smyrna, and had
been kept warm in the Suridji's saddle bags twelve
hours in the twenty-four, lay in disjecta membra around
the marble table, with marks of vain but persevering
attacks in its nibbled edges. The luxury of our larder
was comprised in a flask which had once held Harvey's
sauce, and though the last drop had served as a
condiment to a roasted kid some three months before,
in the Acropolis at Athens, we still clung to it with
affectionate remembrance, and it was offered and refused
daily around the table for the melancholy pleasure
of hearing the mention of its name. It was unlucky
that the only thing which the place afforded of the
best quality, and in sufficient quantities, was precisely
the one thing in the world for which no individual of
the party had any particular relish—water! It was
brought in a gourd from the bed of the “golden-sanded
Pactolus,” rippling away to the plain within pistolshot
of the dining-room; but, to the shame of our simplicity
I must record, that a high-shouldered jug of
the rough wine of Samos, trodden out by the feet of
the lovely slaves of the ægean, and bought for a farthing
the bottle, went oftener to the unclassical lips of
the company. Methinks, now, (the wind east in London,
and the day wet and abominable,) I could barter
the dinner that I shall presently discuss, with its suite
of sherries and anchovy, to kneel down by that golden
river in the sunshine, and drink a draught of pure
lymph under the sky of effeminate Asia. Yet, when
I was there—so rarely do we recognise happiness till
she is gone—I wished myself (where I had never been)
in “merry England.” “Merry,” quotha? Scratch
it out, and write comfortable, I have seen none
“merry” in England, save those who have most cause
to be sad—the abandoned of themselves and the
world!

Out of the reach of ladies and the laws of society,
the most refined persons return very much to the natural
instincts from which they have departed in the
progress of civilization. Job rolled off the marble
column when there was nothing more to eat, and went
to sleep with the marks of the Samian wine turning
up the corners of his mouth like the salacious grin of
a satyr. The Dutchman got his hump into a hollow,
and buried his head in the long grass with the same obedience
to the prompting of nature, and idem the Suridji
and the fig-merchant, leaving me seated alone among the
promiscuous ruins of Sardis and the dinner. The
dish of philosophy I had with myself on that occasion
will appear as a rechauffe in my novel; (I intend to
write one;) but meantime I may as well give you the
practical inference; that, as sleeping after dinner is
evidently Nature's law, Washington Irving is highly
excusable for the practice, and he would be a friend of
reason who should introduce couches and coffee at that
somnolent period, the digestive nap taking the place
of the indigestible politics usually forced upon the company
on the disappearance of the ladies. Why should
the world be wedded for ever to these bigoted inconveniences!

The grand track from the south and west of Asia
Minor passes along the plain between the lofty Acropolis
of Sardis and the tombs of her kings; and with
the snore of travellers from five different nations in
my ear, I sat and counted the camels in one of the
immense caravans never out of sight in the valley of
the Hermus. The long procession of those brown
monsters wound slowly past on their way to Smyrna,
their enormous burthens covered with colored trappings
and swaying backward and forward with their disjointed

gait, and their turbaned masters dozing on the
backs of the small asses of the East, leading each a
score by the tether at his back; the tinkling of their
hundred bells swarmed up through the hot air of the
afternoon with the drowsiest of monotones; the native
oleanders, slender-leaved and tall, and just now in all
their glory, with a color in their bright flowers stolen
from the bleeding lips of Houris, brightened the plains
of Lydia like the flush of sunset lying low on the earth;
the black goats of uncounted herds browsed along the
ancient Sarabat, with their bearded faces turned every
one to the faintly coming wind: the eagles (that abound
now in the mountains from which Sardis and a hundred
silent cities once scared their bold progenitors) sailed
slowly and fearlessly around the airy citadel that flung
open its gates to the Lacedæmonian; and, gradually,
as you may have lost yourself in this tangled paragraph
dear reader, my senses became confused among the
objects it enumerates, and I fell asleep with the speech
of Solon in my ears, and my back to the crumbling
portico of Crœsus.

The Dutchman was drawing my picture when I
awoke, the sun was setting, and Job and the Suridji
were making tea. I am not a very picturesque object,
generally speaking, but done as a wild Arab lying at
the base of a column in a white turban, with a stork's
nest over my head, I am not so ill-looking as you would
suppose. As the Dutchman drew for gelt, and hoped
to sell his picture to some traveller at Smyrna who
would take that opportunity to affirm in his book that
he had been at Sardis, (as vide his own sketch,) I do
not despair of seeing myself yet in lithograph. And,
talking of pictures, I would give something now if I
had engaged that hump-backed draughtsman to make
me a sketch of Job, squat on his hams before a fire in
the wall, and making tea in a tin pot with a “malig

nant and turbaned Turk,” feeding the blaze with the
dry thorn of Syria.[1] It would have been consolation
to his respectable mother, whom he left in the Green
Mountains, (wondering what he could have to do with
following such a scapegrace as myself through the
world,) to have seen him in the turban of a Hajji taking
his tea quietly in ancient Lydia. The green turban,
the sign of the Hajji, belonged more properly to
myself; for though it was Job who went bodily to Jerusalem,
(leaving me ill of a fig-fever at Smyrna,) the
sanctity of the pilgrimage by the Mahomedan law falls
on him who provides the pilgrim with scallop-shell and
sandals, aptly figured forth in this case, we will suppose,
by the sixty American dollars paid by myself for
his voyage to Jaffa and back. The Suridji was a
Hajji, too, and it was amusing to see Job, who respected
every man's religious opinions, and had a little
vanity besides in sharing with the Turk[2] the dignity of
a pilgrimage to the sacred city, washing his knees and
elbows at the hour of prayer, and considerately, but
very much to his own inconvenience, transferring the
ham of the unclean beast from the Mussulman's saddlebags
to his own. It was a delicate sacrifice to a pagan's
prejudices worthy of Socrates or a Christian.

2. II.

In all simple states of society, sunset is the hour of
better angels. The traveller in the desert remembers
his home,—the sea-tost boy his mother and her last
words,—the Turk talks, for a wonder, and the chattering
Greek is silent, for the same,—the Italian forgets
his moustache, and hums la patria,—and the Englishman
delivers himself of the society of his companions,
and “takes a walk.” It is something in the influences
of the hour, and I shall take trouble, some day, to
maintain that morn, noon, and midnight have their ministry
as well, and exercise each an unobserved but salutary
and peculiar office on the feelings.

We all separated “after tea;” the Suridji was off to
find a tethering place for his horses; the Englishman
strolled away by himself to a group of the “tents of
Kedar” far down in the valley with their herds and
herdsmen; the Smyrniote merchant sat by the camel-track
at the foot of the hill waiting for the passing of a
caravan; the Green Mountaineer was wandering around
the ruins of the apostolic church; the Dutchman was
sketching the two Ionic shafts of the fair temple of
Cybele; and I, with a passion for running water which
I have elsewhere alluded to, idled by the green bank
of the Pactolus, dreaming sometimes of Gyges and Alexander,
and sometimes of you, dear Mary!

I passed Job on my way, for the four walls over
which the “Angel of the Church of Sardis” kept his
brooding watch in the days of the Apocalypse stand
not far from the swelling bank of the Pactolus, and
nearly in a line between it and the palace of Crœsus. I
must say that my heart almost stood still with awe as I
stepped over the threshold. In the next moment, the
strong and never-wasting under-current of early religious

feeling rushed back on me, and I involuntarily
uncovered my head, and felt myself stricken with the
spell of holy ground. My friend, who was never without
the Bible that was his mother's parting gift, sat on
the end of the broken wall of the vestibule with the sacred
volume open at the Revelations in his hand.

“I think, Philip,” said he, as I stood looking at him
in silence, “I think my mother will have been told by
an angel that I am here.”

He spoke with a solemnity that, spite of every other
feeling, seemed to me as weighty and true as prophecy.

“Listen, Philip,” said he, “it will be something to
tell your mother as well as mine, that we have read the
Apocalypse together in the Church of Sardis.”

I listened with what I never thought to have heard
in Asia—my mother's voice loud at my heart, as I had
heard it in prayer in my childhood:—

“Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have
not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with
me in white: for they are worthy.”

I strolled on. A little farther up the Pactolus stood
the Temple of Cybele. The church to which “He”
spoke “who hath the seven Spirits of God and the seven
stars,” was a small and humble ruin of brick and mortar;
but, of the Temple of the Heathen Mother of the
World, remained two fair columns of marble with their
curiously carved capitals, and the earth around was
strewn with the gigantic frusta of an edifice, stately
even in the fragments of its prostration. I saw for a
moment the religion of Jupiter and of Christ with the
eyes of Crœsus and the philosopher from Athens; and
then I turned to the living nations that I had left to
wander among these dead empires, and looking still
on the eloquent monuments of what these religions
were, thought of them as they are, in wide-spread Christendom!

We visit Rome and Athens, and walk over the ruined
temples of their gods of wood and stone, and take pride
to ourselves that our imaginations awake the “spirit of
the spot.” But the primitive church of Christ, over
which an angel of God kept watch, whose undefiled
members, if there is truth in holy writ, are now “walkking
with him in white” before the face of the Almighty
—a spot on which the Saviour and his Apostles prayed,
and for whose weal, with the other churches of Asia,
the sublime revelation was made to John—this, the
while, is an unvisited shrine, and the “classic” of Pagan
idolatry is dearer to the memories of men than the
holy antiquities of a religion they profess!

3. III.

The Ionic capitals of the two fair columns of the fallen
temple were still tinged with rosy light on the side
towards the sunset, when the full moon, rising in the
east, burnished the other like a shaft of silver. The
two lights mingled in the sky in a twilight of opal.

“Job,” said I, stooping to reach a handful of sand
as we strolled up the western bank of the river, “can
you resolve me why the poets have chosen to call this
pretty stream the `golden-sanded Pactolus?' Did you
ever see sand of a duller grey?”

“As easy as give you a reason,” answered Job “why
we found the turbidus Hermus, yesterday, the clearest
stream we have forded—why I am no more beautiful
than before, though I have bathed like Venus in the
Scamander—why the pumice of Naxos no longer reduces
the female bust to its virgin proportions—and why
Smyrna and Malta are not the best places for figs and
oranges!”

“And why the old King of Lydia, who possessed
the invisible ring, and kept a devil in his dog's collar,

lies quietly under the earth in the plain below us, and
his ring and his devil were not bequeathed to his successors.
What a pleasant auxiliary to sin must have
been that invisible ring! Spirit of Gyges, thrust thy
finger out of the earth, and commit it once more to a
mortal! Sit down, my dear monster, and let us speculate
in this bright moonshine on the enormities we
would commit.”

As Job was proceeding, in a cautious periphrasis, to
rebuke my irreverent familiarity with the Prince of
Darkness and his works, the twilight had deepened, and
my eye was caught by a steady light twinkling far
above us in the ascending bed of the river. The green
valley wound down from the rear of the Acropolis, and
the single frowning tower stood in broken and strong
relief against the sky, and from the mass of shadow below
peered out, like a star from a cloud-rack, the steady
blaze of a lamp.

“Allons! Job!” said I, making sure of an adventure,
“let us see for whose pleasure a lamp is lit in the
solitude of this ruined city.”

“I could not answer to your honored mother,” said
my scrupulous friend, “if I did not remind you that
this is a spot much frequented by robbers, and that
probably no honest man harbors at that inconvenient
altitude.”

I made a leap over a half-buried frieze that had served
me as a pillow, and commenced the ascent.

“I could as ill answer to your anxious parent,” said
Job, following with uncommon alacrity, “if I did not
partake your dangers when they are inevitable.”

We scrambled up with some difficulty in the darkness,
now rolling into an unseen hollow, now stumbling
over a block of marble, held fast one moment by the
lacerating hooked thorn of Syria, and the next brought
to a stand-still by impenetrable thickets of brushwood.

With a half-hour's toil, however, we stood on a clear
platform of grass, panting and hot, and as I was suggesting
to Job that we had possibly got too high, he
laid his hand on my arm, and, with a sign of silence,
drew me down on the grass beside him.

In a small fairy amphitheatre, half-encircled by a
bend of the Pactolus, and lying a few feet below the
small platform from which we looked, lay six low tents,
disposed in a crescent opposite to that of the stream,
and enclosing a circular area of bright and dewy grass,
of scarce ten feet in diameter. The tents were round,
and laced neatly with wicker work, with their curtain
doors opening inward upon the circle. In the largest
one, which faced nearly down the valley, hung a small
iron lamp of an antique shape, with a wick alight in
one of its two projecting extremities, and beneath it
swung a basket cradle suspended between two stakes,
and kept in motion by a woman apparently of about
forty, whose beauty, but for another more attractive object,
would have rewarded us alone for our toil. The
other tents were closed, and seemed unoccupied, but the
curtain of the one into which our eyes were now straining
with intense eagerness, was looped entirely back to
give admission to the cool night-air, and, in and out,
between the light of the lamp and the full moon, stole
on naked feet a girl of fifteen, whose exqisite symmetry
and unconscious but divine grace of movement filled
my sense of beauty as it had never been filled by the
divinest chisel of the Tribune. She was of the height
and mould of the younger water-nymph in Gibson's
Hylas,[3] with limbs and lips that, had I created and
warmed her to life like Pygmalion, I should have just

hesitated whether or not they wanted another half-shade
of fulness. The large shawl of the East, which
was attached to her girdle, and in more guarded hours
concealed all but her eyes, hung in loose folds from her
waist to her heels, leaving her bust and smoothly-rounded
shoulders entirely bare; and, in strong relief
even upon her clear brown skin, the flakes of her glossy
and raven hair floated over her back, and swept around
her with a grace of a cloud in her indolent motions. A
short petticoat of striped Brusa silk stretched to her
knees, and below appeared the full trowser of the East,
of the same material, narrowed at the ankle, and bound
with what looked in the moonlight an anklet of silver.
A profusion of rings on her fingers, and a gold sequin
on her forehead, suspended from a colored fillet, completed
her dress, and left nothing to be added by the
prude or the painter. She was at that ravishing and
divinest moment of female life, when almost the next
hour would complete her womanhood—like the lotus
ere it lays back to the prying moonlight the snowy leaf
nearest its heart.

She was employed in filling a large jar which stood
at the back of the tent, with water from the Pactolus,
and as she turned with her emptied pitcher, and came
under the full blaze of the lamp in her way outward,
treading lightly lest she should disturb the slumber of
the child in the cradle, and pressing her two round
hands closely to the sides of the vessel, the gradual compression
of my arm by the bony hand which still held
it for sympathy, satisfied me that my own leaping pulse
of admiration found an answering beat in the bosom of
my friend. A silent nod from the woman, whose Greek
profile was turned to us under the lamplight, informed
the lovely water-bearer that her labors were at an end;
and with a gesture expressive of heat, she drew out the
shawl from her girdle, untied the short petticoat, and

threw them aside, and then tripping out into the moonlight,
with only the full silken trowsers from her waist
to her ankles, she sat down on the brink of the small
stream, and with her feet in the water, dropped her
head on her knees, and sat as motionless as marble.

“Gibson should see her now,” I whispered to Job,
“with the glance of the moonlight on that dimpled and
polished back, and her almost glittering hair veiling
about her in such masses, like folds of gossamer!”

“And those slender fingers clasped over her knees,
and the air of melancholy repose which is breathed into
her attitude, and which seems inseparable from those
indolent Asiatics. She is probably a gipsy.”

The noise of the water dashing over a small cascade
a little farther up the stream had covered our approach
and rendered our whispers inaudible. Job's conjecture
was probably right, and we had stumbled on a small
encampment of gipsies,—the men possibly asleep in
those closed tents, or possibly absent at Smyrna. After
a little consultation, I agreed with Job that it would be
impolitic to alarm the camp at night, and resolving on
a visit in the morning, we quietly and unobserved withdrew
from our position, and descended to our own tents
in the ruins of the palace.

4. IV.

The Suridji had given us our spiced coffee in the
small china cups and filagree holders, and we sat discussing,
to the great annoyance of the storks over our
heads, whether we should loiter another day at Sardis,
or eat melons at noon at Casabar on our way to Constantinople.
To the very great surprise of the Dutchman,
who wished to stay to finish his drawings, Job and
myself voted for remaining—a view of the subject which
was in direct contradiction to our vote of the preceding
evening. The Englishman, who was always in a hurry,

flew into a passion, and went off with the phlegmatic
Suridji to look after his horse, and having disposed of our
Smyrniote, by seeing a caravan (which was not to be
seen) coming southward from Mount Tmolus, I and my
monster started for the encampment of the gipsies.

As we rounded the battered wall of the Christian
church, a woman stepped out from the shadow. Through
a tattered dress, and under a turban of soiled cotton set
far over her forehead, and throwing a deep shadow into
her eyes, I recognized at once the gipsy woman whom
we had seen sitting by the cradle.

“Buon giorno, Signori,” she said, making a kind of
salaam, and relieving me at once by the Italian salutation
of my fears of being unintelligible.

Job gave her the good morning, but she looked at
him with a very unsatisfactory glance, and coming close
to my car, she wished me to speak to her out of the
hearing of “il mio domestico!”

“Amico piu tosto!” I added immediately with a consideration
for Job's feelings, which, I must do myself the
justice to say, I always manifested, except in very elegant
society. I gave myself the greater credit in this
case, as, in my impatience to know the nature of the gipsy's
communication, I might be excused for caring little
at the moment whether my friend was taken for a gentleman
or a gentleman's gentleman.

The gipsy looked vexed at her mistake, and with a
half-apologetic inclination to Job, she drew me into the
shade of the ruin, and perused my face with great earnestness.
The same to yourself, thought I, as I gave
back her glance, and searched for her meaning in two
as liquid and loving eyes as ever looked out of the gates
of the Prophet's Paradise for the coming of a young
believer. It was a face that had been divine, and in the
hands of a lady of fashion would have still made a bello
rifacimento.

“Inglese?” she said at last.

“No, Madre—Americano.”

She looked disappointed.

“And where are you going, filio mio?”

“To Stamboul.”

“Benissimo!” she answered, and her face brightened.
“Do you want a servant?”

“Unless it is yourself, no!”

“It is my son.”

It was on my lips to ask if he was like her daughter,
but an air of uneasiness and mystery in her manner put
me on the reserve, and I kept my knowledge to myself.
She persevered in her suit, and at last the truth came
out, that her boy was bound on an errand to Constantinople,
and she wished safe-conduct for him. The rest
of the troop, she said, were at Smyrna, and she was left
in care of the tents with the boy and an infant child. As
she did not mention the girl, who, from the resemblance,
was evidently her daughter—I thought it unwise to
allude to our discovery, and promising that, if the boy
was mounted, every possible care should be taken of
him, I told her the hour on the following morning
when we should be in the saddle, and rid myself of her
with the intention of stealing a march on the camp.

I took rather a circuitous route, but the gipsy was
there before me, and apparently alone. She had sent
the boy to the plains for a horse, and though I presumed
that the loveliest creature in Asia was concealed
in one or the other of those small tents, the curtains
were closely tied, and I could find no apology for intruding
either my eyes or my inquiries. The handsome
Zingara, too, began to look rather becomingly
fiere, and as I had left Job behind, and was always
naturally afraid of a woman, I reluctantly felt myself
under the necessity of comprehending her last injunction,

and with a promise that the boy should join us
before we reached the foot of Mount Sypilus, she fairly
bowed me off the premises. I could have forsworn
my complexion and studied palmistry for a gipsy, had
the devil then tempted me!

5. V.

We struck our tents at sun-rise, and were soon
dashing on through the oleanders upon the broad plain
of the Hermus, the dew lying upon their bright vermeil
flowers like the pellucid gum on the petals of the
ice-plant, and nature, and my five companions, in their
gayest humor. I was not. My thoughts were of
moonlight and the Pactolus, and two round feet ankle-deep
in running water. Job rode up to my side.

“My dear Phil! take notice that you are nearing
Mount Sypilus, in which the magnetic ore was first
discovered.”

“It acts negatively on me, my dear chum! for I
drag a lengthening chain from the other direction.”

Silence once more, and the bright red flowers still
fled backward in our career. Job rode up again.

“You must excuse my interrupting your reverie, but
I thought you would like to know that the town where
we sleep to night is the residence of the `Beys of Oglou,'
mentioned in the `Bride of Abydos.”'

No answer, and the bright red blossoms still flew
scattered in our path as our steeds flew through the
coppice, and the shovel-like blades of the Turkish
stirrups cut into them right and left in the irregular
gallop. Job rode again to my side.

“My dear Philip, did you know that this town of
Magnesia was once the capital of the Turkish empire
—the city of Timour the Tartar?”

“Well!”

“And did you know that when Themistocles was
in exile, and Artaxerxes presented him with the tribute
of three cities to provide the necessaries of life,
Magnesia[4] found him in bread?”

“And Lampascus in wine. Don't bore me, Job!”

We sped on. As we neared Casabar toward noon,
and (spite of romance) I was beginning to think with
complacency upon the melons, for which the town is
famous, a rattling of hoofs behind put our horses upon
their mettle, and in another moment a boy dashed into
the midst of our troop, and reining up with a fine display
of horsemanship, put the promised token into my
hand. He was mounted on a small Arabian mare, remarkable
for nothing but a thin and fiery nostril, and
a most lavish action, and his jacket and turban were
fitted to a shape and head that could not well be disguised.
The beauty of the gipsy camp was beside me!

It was as well for my self-command that I had sworn
Job to secrecy in case of the boy's joining us, and
that I had given the elder gipsy, as a token, a very
voluminous and closely-written letter of my mother's.
In the twenty minutes which the reading of so apparently
“lengthy” a document would occupy, I had
leisure to resume my self-control, and resolve on my
own course of conduct toward the fair masquerader.
My travelling companions were not a little astonished
to see me receive a letter by courier in the heart of
Asia, but that was for their own digestion. All the
information I condescended to give was, that the boy
was sent to my charge on his road to Constantinople;
and as Job displayed no astonishment, and entered

simply into my arrangements, and I was the only person
in the company who could communicate with the
Suridji, (I had picked up a little modern Greek in the
Morea,) they were compelled (the Dutchman, John
Bull, and the fig-merchant) to content themselves with
such theories on the subject as Heaven might supply
them withal.

How Job and myself speculated apart on what could
be the errand of this fair creature to Constantinople—
how beautifully she rode and sustained her character
as a boy—how I requested her, though she spoke Italian
like her mother, never to open her lips in any
Christian language to my companions—how she slept
at my feet at the khans, and rode at my side on the
journey, and, at the end of seven days, arriving at Scutari,
and beholding across the Bosphorus the golden
spires of Stamboul, how she looked at me with tears
in her unfathomable eyes, and spurred her fleet Arab
to his speed to conceal her emotion, and how I felt
that I could bury myself with her in the Vizier's tomb
we were passing at the moment, and be fed on rice
with a goule's bodkin, if so alone we might not be
parted—all these are matters which would make sundry
respectable chapters in a novel, but of which you
are spared the particulars in a true story. There was
a convenience both to the dramatist and the audience
in the “cetera intus agentus” of the Romans.

6. VI.

We emerged from the pinnacled cypresses of the
cemetery overlooking Constantinople, and dismounting
from my horse, I climbed upon the gilded turban
crowning the mausoleum of a royal Ichoglan, (a sultan's
page, honored more in his burial than in his life,)
and feasted my eyes on the desecrated but princely-fair
birth-right of the Palæologi. The Nekropolis—

the city of the dead—on the outermost tomb of whose
gloomy precincts I had profanely mounted, stands
high and black over the Bosphorus on one side, while
on the other, upon similar eminences, stand the gleaming
minarets and latticed gardens of a matchless city
of the living—as if, while Europe flung up her laughing
and breathing child to the sun, expiring Asia, the
bereaved Empress of the world, lifted her head to the
same heavens in majestic and speechless sorrow.

But oh! how fairer than Venice in her waters,—
than Florence and Rome in their hills and habitations,
than all the cities of the world in that which is most
their pride and glory,—is this fairest metropolis of the
Mahomets! With its two hundred mosques, each
with a golden sheaf of minarets laying their pointed
fingers against the stars, and encircled with the fretted
galleries of the callers to prayer, like the hand of a
cardinal with its costly ring,—with its seraglio gardens
washed on one side by the sea, and on the other by the
gentle stream that glides out of the “Valley of Sweet
Waters;”—men-of-war on one side, flaunting their red
pennants over the nightingale's nest which sings for
the delight of a princess, and the swift caique on the
other gliding in protected waters, where the same imprisoned
fair one might fling into it a flower, (so slender
is the dividing cape that shuts in the bay,)—with
its Bosphorus, its radiant and unmatched Bosphorus—
the most richly-gemmed river within the span of the
sun, extending with its fringe of palaces and castles
from sea to sea, and reflecting in its glassy eddies a
pomp and sumptuousness of costume and architecture
which exceeds even your boyish dreams of Bagdad
and the caliphs—Constantinople, I say, with its turbaned
and bright-garmented population,—its swarming
sea and rivers,—its columns, and aqueducts, and
strange ships of the East,—its impenetrable seraglio,
and its close-shuttered harems,—its bezestein and its

Hippodrome,—Constantinople lay before me! If the
star I had worshipped had descended to my hand out
of the sky,—if my unapproachable and yearning dream
of woman's beauty had been bodied forth warm and
real—if the missing star in the heel of Serpentarius,
and the lost sister of the Pleiades had waltzed back
together to their places,—if poets were once more
prophets, not felons, and books were read for the good
that is in them, not for the evil,—if Love and Truth
had been seen again, or any impossible or improbable
thing had come to pass,—I should not have felt more
thrillingly than now the emotions of surprise and wonder!

While I stood upon the marble turban of the Ichoglan,
my companions had descended the streets of
Scutari, and I was left alone with the gipsy. She sat
on her Arab with her head bowed to his neck, and
when I withdrew my eye from the scene I have faintly
described, the tear-drops were glistening in the flowing
mane, and her breast was heaving under her embroidered
jacket with uncontrollable grief. I jumped
to the ground, and taking her head between my hands,
pressed her wet cheek to my lips.

“We part here, Signor,” said she, winding around
her head the masses of hair that had escaped from her
turban, and raising herself in the saddle as if to go on.

“I hope not, Maimuna!”

She bent her moist eyes on me with a look of earnest
inquiry.

“You are forbidden to intrust me with your errand
to Constantinople, and you have kept your word to
your mother. But, whatever that errand may be, I
hope it does not involve your personal liberty?”

She looked embarrassed, but did not answer.

“You are very young to be trusted so far from your
mother, Maimuna!”

“Signor, si!”

“But I think she can scarce have loved you so well
as I do to have suffered you to come here alone!”

“She intrusted me to you, Signor.”

I was well reminded of my promise. I had given
my word to the gipsy that I would leave her child at
the Persian fountain of Tophana. Maimuna was
evidently under a control stronger than the love I half-hoped
and half-feared I had awakened.

“Andiamo!” she said, dropping her head upon her
bosom with the tears pouring once more over it like
rain; and driving her stirrups with abandoned energy
into the sides of her Arabian, she dashed headlong
down the uneven streets of Scutari, and in a few minutes
we stood on the limit of Asia.

We left our horses in the “silver city,”[5] crossing to
the “golden” in a caique, and with Maimuna in my
bosom, and every contending emotion at work in my
heart, the scene about me still made an indelible impression
on my memory. The star-shaped bay, a
mile perhaps in diameter, was one swarm of boats of
every most slender and graceful form, the caikjis, in
their silken shirts and vari-colored turbans, driving
them through the water with a speed and skill which
put to shame the gondolier of Venice, and almost the
Indian in his canoe; the gilded lattices and belvideres
of the seraglio, and the cypresses and flowering trees
that mingle their gay and sad foliage above them, were
already so near that I could count the roses upon the
bars, and see the moving of the trees in the evening
wind; the muezzins were calling to sunset-prayer,
their voices coming clear and prolonged over the
water; the men-of-war in the mouth of the Bosphorus
were lowering their blood-red flags; the shore we

were approaching was thronged with veiled women,
and bearded old men, and boys with the yellow slipper
and red skull-cap of the East; and, watching our approach,
stood apart, a group of Jews and Armenians,
marked by their costume for an inferior race, but looking
to my cosmopolite eye as noble in their black robes
and towering caps as the haughty Mussulman that
stood aloof from their company.

We set foot in Constantinople. It was the suburb
of Tophana, and the Suridji pointed out to Maimuna,
as we landed, a fountain of inlaid marble and brass,
around whose projecting frieze were traced inscriptions
in the Persian. She sprang to my hand.

“Remember, Maimuna!” I said, “that I offer you
a mother and a home in another and a happier land.
I will not interfere with your duty, but when your errand
is done, you may find me if you will. Farewell.”

With a passionate kiss in the palm of my hand, and
one beaming look of love and sorrow in her large and
lustrous eyes, the gipsy turned to the fountain, and
striking suddenly to the left around the mosque of
Sultan Selim, she plunged into the narrow street running
along the water-side to Galata.

7. VII.

We had wandered out from our semi-European,
semi-Turkish lodgings on the third morning after our
arrival at Constantinople, and picking our way listlessly
over the bad pavement of the suburb of Pera,
stood at last in the small burying-ground at the summit
of the hill, disputing amicably upon what quarter
of the fair city beneath us we should bestow our share
in the bliss of that June morning.

“It is a heavenly day,” said Job, sitting down unthinkingly
upon a large sculptured turban that formed
the head-stone to the grave of some once-wealthy

Pagan, and looking off wistfully toward the green
summit of Bulgurlu.

The difference between Job and myself was a mania,
on his part for green fields, and on mine for human
faces. I knew very well that his remark was a leader
to some proposition for a stroll over the wilder hills of
the Bosphorus, and I was determined that he should
enjoy, instead, the pleasure of sympathy in my nevertiring
amusement of wandering in the crowded bazaars
on the other side of the water. The only way to accomplish
it, was to appear to yield the point, and then
rally upon his generosity. I had that delicacy for his
feelings (I had brought him all the way from the Green
Mountains at my own expense) never to carry my
measures too ostentatiously.

Job was looking south, and my face was as resolutely
turned north. We must take a caique in
any case at Galata, (lying just below us) but if we
turned the prow south in the first instance, farewell at
every stroke to the city! Whereas a northern course
took us straight up the Golden Horn, and I could appear
to change my mind at any moment, and land immediately
in a street leading to the bazaars. Luckily,
while I was devising an errand to go up the channel
instead of down, a small red flag appeared gliding
through the forest of masts around the curve of the
water-side at Tophana, and, in a moment more, a
high-pooped vessel, with the carved railings and out-landish
rigging of the ships from the far East, shot out
into the middle of the bay with the strong current of
the Bosphorus, and squaring her lattine sail, she
rounded a vessel lying at anchor with the flag of Palestine,
and steered with a fair wind up the channel of the
Golden Horn. A second look at her deck disclosed
to me a crowd of people, mostly women, standing
amid-ships, and the supposition with which I was about

inducing Job to take a caique and pull up the harbor
after her seemed to me now almost a certainty.

“It is a slave-ship from Trebizond, ten to one, my
dear Job!”

He slid off the marble turban which he had profaned
so unscrupulously, and the next minute we
passed the gate that divides the European from the
commercial suburb, and were plunging down the steep
and narrow straits of Galata with a haste that, to the
slippered and shuffling Turks we met or left behind,
seemed probably little short of madness. Of a hundred
slender and tossing caiques lying in the disturbed
waters of the bay, we selected the slenderest and best
manned; and getting Job in with the usual imminent
danger of driving his long legs through the bottom of
the egg-shell craft, we took in one of the obsequious
Jews who swarm about the pier as interpreters, coiled
our legs under us in the hollow womb of the caique,
and shot away like a nautilus after the slaver.

The deep-lying river that coils around the throbbing
heart of Constantinople is a place of as delicate navigation
as a Venetian lagoon on a festa, or a soiree of
middling authors. The Turk, like your plain-spoken
friend, rows backward, and with ten thousand eggshells
swarming about him in every direction, and his
own prow rounded off in a pretty iron point, an extra
piastre for speed draws down curses on the caikji and
the Christian dogs who pay him for the holes he lets
into his neighbors' boats, which is only equalled in bitterness
and profusion by the execrations which follow
what is called “speaking your mind.” The Jew
laughed, as Jews do since Shylock, at the misfortunes
of his oppressors; and, in the exercise of his vocation,
translated us the oaths as they came in right and left
—most of them very gratuitous attacks on those, (as
Job gravely remarked,) of whom they could know
very little,—our respected mothers.

The slackening vessel lost her way as she got opposite
the bazaar of dried fruits, and, as her yards came
down by the run, she put up her helm, and ran her
towering prow between a piratical-looking Egyptian
craft, and a black and bluff English collier, inscribed
appropriately on the stern as the “Snow-drop” from
Newcastle. Down plumped her anchor, and in the
next moment the Jew hailed her by our orders, and
my conjecture was proved to be right. She was from
Trebizond, with slaves and spices.

“What would they do if we were to climb up her
side?” I asked of the Israelite.

He stretched up his crouching neck till his twisted
beard hung clear off like a waterfall from his chin,
and looked through the carved railing very intently.

“The slaves are Georgians,” he answered, after
awhile, “and if there were no Turkish purchasers on
board, they might simply order you down again.”

“And if there were—”

“The women would be considered damaged by a
Christian eye, and the slave merchant might shoot you
or pitch you overboard.”

“Is that all?” said Job, evolving his length very
deliberately from its coil, and offering me a hand the
next moment from the deck of the slaver. Whether
the precedence he took in all dangers arose from affection
for me, or from a praiseworthy indifference to the
fate of such a trumpery collection as his own body and
limbs, I have never decided to my own satisfaction.

In the confusion of port-officers and boats alongside,
all hailing and crying out together, we stood on the
outer side of the deck unobserved, and I was soon intently
occupied in watching the surprise and wonder
of the pretty toys who found themselves for the first
time in the heart of a great city. The owner of their
charms, whichever of a dozen villanous Turks I saw
about them it might be, had no time to pay them very

particular attention, and dropping their dirty veils
about their shoulders, they stood open-mouthed and
staring—ten or twelve rosy damsels in their teens, with
eyes as deep as a well, and almost as large and liquid.
Their features were all good, their skins without a
flaw, hair abundant, and figures of a healthy plumpness—looking,
with the exception of their eyes, which
were very oriental and magnificent, like the great, fat,
pie-eating, yawning, boarding-school misses one sees
over a hedge at Hampstead. It was delicious to see
their excessive astonishment at the splendors of the
Golden Horn—they from the desert mountains of
Georgia or Circassia, and the scene about them,
(mosques, minarets, people, and men-of-war all together,)
probably the most brilliant and striking in the
world. I was busy following their eyes and trying to
divine their impressions, when Job seized me by the
arm. An old Turk had just entered the vessel from
the land-side, and was assisting a closely-veiled female
to mount after him. Half a glance satisfied me that it
was the Gipsy of Sardis—the lovely companion of our
journey to Constantinople.

“Maimuna!” I exclaimed, darting forward on the
instant.

A heavy hand struck me back as I touched her, and
as I returned the blow, the swarthy crew of Arabs
closed about us, and we were hurried with a most unceremonious
haste to the side of the vessel. I scarce
know, between my indignation and the stunning effect
of the blow I had received, how I got into the caique,
but we were pulling fast up the Golden Horn by the
time I could speak, and in half an hour were set ashore
on the green bank of the Barbyses, bound on a solitary
ramble up the Valley of Sweet Waters.

8. VIII.

The art of printing was introduced into the Mohammedan
Empire in the reigns of Achmet III. and
Louis XV. I seldom state a statistical fact, but this is
one I happen to know, and I mention it because the
most fanciful and romantic abode with which I am acquainted
in the world was originally built to contain
the first printing-press brought from the Court of Versailles
by Mehemet Effendi, Ambassador from the
“Brother of the Sun.” It is now a maison de plaisance
for the Sultan's favorite women, and in all the
dreams of perfect felicity which visit those who have
once seen it, it rises as the Paradise of retreats from
the world.

The serai of Khyat-Khana is a building of gold
and marble, dropped down unfenced upon the greensward
in the middle of a long emerald valley, more
like some fairy vision, conjured and forgotten to be
dissolved, than a house to live in, real, weather-proof,
and to be seen for the value of one and sixpence. The
Barbyses falls over the lip of a sea-shell, (a marble
cascade sculptured in that pretty device,) sending up
its spray and its perpetual music close under the gilded
lattice of the Sultana, and, following it back with the
eye, like a silver thread in a broidery of green velvet,
it comes stealing down through miles of the tenderest
verdure, without tree or shrub upon its borders, but
shut in with the seclusion of an enchanted stream and
valley by mountains which rise in abrupt precipices
from the edges of its carpet of grass, and fling their
irregular shadows across it at every hour save high
noon—sacred in the East to the sleep of beauty and
idleness.

In the loving month of May it is death to set foot in
the Khyat-Khana. The ascending caique is stopped

in the Golden Horn, and on the point of every hill is
stationed a mounted eunuch with drawn sabre. The
Arab steeds of the Sultan are picketed on the low-lying
grass of the valley, and his hundred Circassians
come from their perfumed chambers in the seraglio,
and sun their untold loveliness on the velvet banks of
the Barbyses. From the Golden Horn to Belgrade,
twelve miles of greensward, (sheltered like a vein of
ore in the bosom of the earth, and winding away after
the course of that pebbly river, unseen, save by the
eye of the sun and stars,) are sacred in this passion-born
month from the foot of man, and, riding in their
scarlet arubas with the many-colored ribbons floating
back from the horns of their bullocks, and their own
snowy veils dropped from their guarded shoulders and
deep-dyed lips, wander, from sunrise to sunset, these
caged birds of a Sultan's delight, longing as wildly,
(who shall doubt?) to pass that guarded barrier into
the forbidden world, as we, who sigh for them without,
to fly from falsehood and wrong, and forget that same
world in their bosoms!

How few are content! How restless are even the
most spoiled children of Fortune! How inevitably
the heart sighs for that which it has not, even though
its only want is a cloud on its perpetual sunshine!
We were not of those—Job and I—for we were of
that school of philosophers[6] who “had little and
wanted nothing;” but we agreed, as we sat upon the
marble bridge sprung like a wind-lifted cobweb over
the Barbyses, that the envy of a human heart would
poison even the content of a beggar! He is a fool
who is sheltered from hunger and cold and still complains
of fortune; but he is only not a slave or a seraph,

who, feeling on the innermost fibre of his sensibility the
icy breath of Malice, utters his eternal malison on the
fiend who can neither be grappled with nor avoided.
I could make a paradise with loveliness and sunshine,
if Envy could be forbidden at the gate!

We had walked around the Serai and tried all its
entrances in vain, when Job spied, under the shelter
of the southern hill, a blood-red flag flying at the top
of a small tent of the Prophet's green—doubtless concealing
the Kervas, who kept his lonely guard over
the precincts. I sent my friend with a “pinch of piastres”
to tempt the trowsered infidel to our will, and
he soon came shuffling in his unmilitary slippers, with
keys, which, the month before, were guarded like the
lamp of Aladdin. We entered. We rambled over
the chambers of the chosen Houris of the East; we
looked through their lattices, and laid the palms of
our hands on the silken cushions dimmed in oval spots
by the moisture of their cheeks as they slept; we could
see by the tarnished gold, breast-high at the windows,
where they had pressed to the slender lattices to look
forth upon the valley; and Job, more watchfully alive
to the thrilling traces of beauty, showed me in the diamond-shaped
bars the marks of their moist fingers and
the stain as of lips between, betraying where they had
clung and laid their faces against the trellice in the indolent
attitude of gazers from a wearisome prison.
Mirrors and ottomans were the only furniture; and
never, for me, would the wand of Cornelius Agrippa
have been more welcome, than to wave back into
those senseless mirrors the images of beauty they had
lost.

I sat down on a raised corner of the divan, probably
the privileged seat of the favorite of the hour. Job
stood with his lips apart, brooding in speechless poeticalness
on his own thoughts.

“Do you think, after all,” said I, reverting to the
matter-of-fact vein of my own mind, which was paramount
usually to the romantic; “do you think really,
Job, that the Zuleikas and Fatimas who have by turns
pressed this silken cushion with their crossed feet were
not probably inferior in attraction to the most third-rate
belle of New-England? How long would you
love a woman that could neither read, nor write, nor
think five minutes on any given theme? The utmost
exertion of intellect in the loveliest of these deep-eyed
Circassians is probably the language of flowers, and,
good heavens! think how one of your della Cruscan
sentiments would be lost upon her! And yet here you
are, ready to go mad with romantic fancies about
women that were never taught even their letters.”

Job began to hum a stave of his favorite song,
which was always a sign that he was vexed and disenchanted
of himself.

“How little women think,” said I, proceeding with
my unsentimental vein, while Job looked out of the
window and the Kervas smoked his pipe on the Sultana's
ottoman; “how little women think that the
birch and the dark closet, and the thumbed and dogeared
spelling-book, (or whatever else more refined
torments their tender years in the shape of education,)
was, after all, the ground-work and secret of their fascination
over men! What a process it is to arrive at
love! `D-o-g, dog,—c-a-t,cat!' If you had not
learned this, bright Lady Melicent, I fear Captain Augustus
Fitz-Somerset would never have sat, as I saw
him last night, cutting your initials with a diamond
ring on the purple claret-glass which had just poured
a bumper to your beauty!”

“You are not far wrong,” said Job, after a long
pause, during which I had delivered myself, unheard,
of the above practical apostrophe; “you are not far

wrong, quoad the women of New-England. They
would be considerable bores if they had not learned,
in their days of bread-and-butter, to read, write, and
reason. But, for the woman of the softer South and
East, I am by no means clear that education would
not be inconsistent with the genius of the clime. Take
yourself back to Italy, for example, where, for two
mortal years, you philandered up and down between
Venice and Amalfi, never out of the sunshine or away
from the feet of women, and, in all that precious episode
of your youth, never guilty, I will venture to presume,
of either suggesting or expressing a new thought.
And the reason is, not that the imagination is dull, but
that nobody thinks, except upon exigency, in these
latitudes. It would be violent and inapt to the spirit
of the hour. Indolence, voluptuous indolence of body
and mind, (the latter at the same time lying broad
awake in its chamber, and alive to every pleasurable
image that passes uncalled before its windows,) is the
genius, the only genius, of the night and day. What
would be so discordant as an argument by moonlight
in the Coliseum? What so ill-bred and atrocious as
the destruction by logic of the most loose-spun theory
by the murmuring fountains of the Pamfili? To live
is enough in these lands of the sun. But merely to live,
in ours, is to be bound, Prometheus-like, to a rock,
with a vulture at our vitals. Even in the most passionate
intercourse of love in your northern clime, you
read to your mistress, or she sings to you, or you think
it necessary to drive or ride; but I know nothing that
would more have astonished your Venetian bionda
than, when the lamp was lit in the gondola that you
might see her beauty on the lagune in the starless
night, to have pulled a book from your pocket, and
read even a tale of love from Boccaccio. And that is
why I could be more content to be a pipe-bearer in
Asia than a schoolmaster in Vermont, or, sooner than
a judge's ermine in England, to wear a scrivener's
rags, and sit in the shade of a portico, writing love-letters
for the peasant-girls of Rome. Talk of republics,
—your only land of equality is that in which to breathe
is the supreme happiness. The monarch throws open
his window for the air that comes to him past the brow
of a lazzaroni, and the wine on the patrician's lip intoxicates
less than the water from the fountain that is
free to all, though it gush from the marble bosom of a
nymph. If I were to make a world, I would have the
climate of Greece, and no knowledge that did not
come by intuition. Men and women should grow
wise enough, as the flowers grow fair enough, with
sunshine and air, and they should follow their instincts
like the birds, and go from sweet to sweet with as little
reason or trouble. Exertion should be a misdemeanor,
and desire of action, if it were not too monstrous
to require legislation, should be treason to the
state.”

“Long live King Job!”

2. PART II.

I had many unhappy thoughts about Miamuna. The
glance I had snatched on board the Trebizond slaver
left in my memory a pair of dark eyes full of uneasiness
and doubt, and I knew her elastic motions so well,
that there was something in her single step as she came
over the gang-way which assured me that she was dispirited
and uncertain of her errand. Who was the
old Turk who dragged her up the vessel's side with so
little ceremony? What could the child of a gipsy be
doing on the deck of a slaver from Trebizond?

With no very definite ideas as to the disposal of this
lovely child should I succeed in my wishes, I had insensibly
made up my mind that she could never be
happy without me, and that my one object in Constantinople
was to get her into my possession. I had a
delicacy in communicating the full extent of my design
to Job, for, aside from the grave view he would take
of the morality of the step, and her probable fate as a
woman, he would have painful and just doubts of my
ability to bear this additional demand upon my means.
Though entirely dependent himself, Job had that natural
contempt for the precious metals, that he could

not too freely assist any one to their possession who
happened to set a value on the amount in his pocket;
and this, I may say, was the one point which, between
my affectionate monster and myself, was not discussed
as harmoniously as the loves of Corydon and Alexis.
The account of his expenditure, which I regularly exacted
of him before he tied on his bandana at night,
was always more or less unsatisfactory; and though
he would not have hesitated to bestow a whole scudo
unthinkingly on the first dirty dervish he should meet,
he was still sufficiently impressed with the necessity
of economy to remember it in an argument of any
length or importance; and for this and some other
reasons I reserved my confidence upon the intended
addition to my suite.

Not far from the Burnt Column, in the very heart
of Stamboul, lived an old merchant in attar and jessamine,
called Mustapha. Every one who has been at
Constantinople will remember him and his Nubian
slave in a small shop on the right, as you ascend to
the Hippodrome. He calls himself essence-seller to
the Sultan, but his principal source of profit is the
stranger who is brought to his divans by the interpreters
in his pay; and to his credit be it said, that for the
courtesy of his dealings, and for the excellence of his
extracts, the stranger could not well fall into better
hands.

It had been my fortune, on my first visit to Mustapha,
to conciliate his good will. I had laid in my
small stock of spice-woods and essences on that occasion,
and the call which I made religiously every time
I crossed the Golden Horn was purely a matter of
friendship. In addition to one or two trifling presents,
which (with a knowledge of human nature) I
had returned in the shape of two mortal sins—a keg
of brandy and a flask of gin, bought out of the English

collier lying in the bay; in addition to his kind
presents, I say, my large-trowsered friend had made
me many pressing offers of service. There was little
probability, it was true, that I should ever find occasion
to profit by them; but I nevertheless believed
that his hand was laid upon his heart in earnest sincerity,
and in the course of my reflections upon the fate of
Maimuna, it had occurred to me more than once that
he might be of use in clearing up the mystery of her
motions.

“Job!” said I, as we were dawdling along the street
of confectioners with our Jew behind us one lovely
morning, “I am going to call at Mustapha's.”

We had started to go to the haunt of the opium-eaters,
and he was rather surprised at my proposition,
but, with his usual amiableness, (very inconvenient
and vexatious in this particular instance,) he stepped
over the gutter without saying a word, and made for
the first turning to the right. It was the first time
since we had left New-England that I wished myself
rid of his company.

“But, Job,” said I, calling him back to the shady
side of the street, and giving him a great lump of candy
from the nearest stall (its Oriental name, by the way,
is “peace-to-your-throat,”) “I thought you were bent
on eating opium to-day?”

My poor friend looked at me for a minute, as if to
comprehend the drift of my remark, and as he arrived
by regular deduction at the result, I read very clearly
in his hideous physiognomy the painful embarrassment
it occasioned him. It was only the day before, that,
in descending the Bosphorus, we had seen a party of
the summary administrators of justice quietly suspending
a Turkish woman and her Greek paramour from
the shutters of a chamber window—intercourse with a
Christian in that country of liberal legislation being
punishable without trial or benefit of dervish. From

certain observations on my disposition in the course of
my adventures, Job had made up his mind, I well
knew, that my danger was more from Dalilah than the
Philistines; and while these victims of love were kicking
their silken trowsers in the air, I saw, by the look
of tender anxiety he cast upon me from the bottom of
the caique, that the moral in his mind would result in
an increased vigilance over my motions. While he
stood with his teeth stuck full of “peace-to-your-throat,”
therefore, forgetting even the instinct of mastication
in his surprise and sorrow, I well understood
what picture was in his mind, and what construction
he put upon my sudden desire to solitude.

“My dear Philip!” he began, speaking with difficulty
from the stickiness of the candy in his teeth,
“your respected mother—”

At this instant a kervas, preceding a Turk of rank,
jostled suddenly against him, and as the mounted Mussulman,
with his train of runners and pipe-bearers,
came sweeping by, I took the opportunity of Job's surprise
to slip past with the rest, and, turning down an
alley, quietly mounted one of the saddle-horses standing
for hire at the first mosque, and pursued my way
alone to the shop of the attar-merchant. To dismount
and hurry Mustapha into his inner and private apartment,
with an order to the Nubian to deny me to everybody
who should inquire, was the work of a minute,
but it was scarcely done before I heard Job breathless
at the door.

“Ha visto il signore?” he exclaimed, getting to the
back of the shop with a single stride.

“Effendi, no!” said the imperturbable Turk, and he
laid his hand on his heart, as he advanced, and offered
him with grave courtesy the pipe from his lips.

The Jew had come puffing into the shop with his
slippers in his hand, and dropping upon his hams near
the door, he took off his small grey turban, and was

wiping the perspiration from his high and narrow forehead,
when Job darted again into the street with a
sign to him to follow. The look of despair and exhaustion
with which he shook out his baggy trowsers
and made after the striding Yankee, was too much even
for the gravity of Mustapha. He laid aside his pipe,
and, as the Nubian struck in with the peculiar cackle
of his race, I joined myself in their meriment with a
heartiness to which many a better joke might have
failed to move me.

While Mustapha was concluding his laugh between
the puffs of his amber pipe, I had thrown myself along
the divan, and was studying with some curiosity the
inner apartment in which I had been concealed. A
curtain of thick but tarnished gold cloth (as sacred
from intrusion in the East as the bolted and barred
doors of Europe) separated from the outer shop a
small octagonal room, that, in size and furniture, resembled
the Turkish boudoirs, which, in the luxurious
palaces of Europe, sometimes adjoin a lady's chamber.
The slippered foot was almost buried in the rich carpets
laid, but not fitted to the floor. The divans were
covered with the flowered and lustrous silk of Brusa,
and piled with vari-colored cushions. A perpetual
spice-lamp sent up its thin wreaths of smoke to the
black and carved ceiling, diffusing through the room a
perfume which, while it stole to the innermost fibres of
the brain with a sense of pleasure, weighed on the eyelids
and relaxed the limbs; and as the eye became more
accustomed to the dim light which struggled in from a
window in the arched ceiling, and dissolved in the luxurious
and spicy atmosphere, heaps of the rich shawls
of the East became distinguishable with their sumptuous
dyes, and, in a corner, stood a cluster of crystal
narghiles, faintly reflecting the light in their dim globes
of rose water, while costly pipes, silver-mounted pistols,

and a rich Damascus sabre in a sheath of red velvet,
added gorgeousness to the apartment.

Mustapha was a bit of a philosoper in his way, and
he had made his own observations on the Europeans
who came to his shop. The secluded and oriental luxuriousness
of the room I have described was one of
his lures to that passion for the picturesque which he
saw in every traveler; and another was his gigantic
Nubian, who, with bracelets and anklets of gold, a
white turban, and naked legs and arms, stood always
at the door of his shop, inviting the passers-by---not to
buy essences and pastilles---but to come in and take
sherbet with his master. You will have been an hour
upon his comfortable divans, have smoked a pipe or
two, and eaten a snowy sherbet or a dish of rice-paste
and sugar, before Mustapha nods to his slave, and produces
his gold-rimmed jars of essences, from which,
with his fat forefinger, he anoints the palm of your
hand, or, with a compliment to the beauty of your hair,
throws a drop into the curl on your temples. Meanwhile,
as you smoke, the slave lays in the bowl of your
pipe a small pastille wrapped in gold leaf, from which
presently arrives to your nostrils a perfume that might
delight a Sultan; and then, from the two black hands
which are held to you full of cubical-edged phials with
gilded stoppers, you are requested with the same bland
courtesy to select such as in size or shape suit your
taste and convenience---the smallest of them, when
filled with attar, worth near a gold piastre.

This is not very ruinous, and your next temptation
comes in the shape of a curiously-wrought censer,
upon the filagree grating of which is laid strips of odorent
wood which, with the heat of the coals beneath,
give out a perfume like gums from Araby. This,
Mustapha swears to you by his beard, has a spell in its
spicy breath provocative as a philtre, and is to be burnt
in your lady's chamber. It is worth its weight in

gold, and for a handful of black chips you are persuaded
to pay a price which would freight a caique
with cinnamon. Then come bracelets, and amulets,
and purses, all fragrant and precious, and, while you
hesitate, the Nubian brings you coffee that would open
the heart of Shylock, and you drink and purchase.
And when you have spent all your money, you go away
delighted with Mustapha, and quite persuaded that you
are vastly obliged to him. And, all things considered,
so you are!

When Mustapha had finished his prayers, (did I say
that it was noon?) he called in the Nubian to roll up
the sacred carpet, and then closing the curtain between
us and the shop, listened patiently to my story of the
Gipsy, which I told him faithfully from the beginning.
When I arrived at the incident on board the slaver, a
sudden light seemed to strike upon his mind.

“Pekhe, filio mio! pekhe!” he exclaimed, running
his forefinger down the middle of his beard, and pouring
out a volume of smoke from his mouth and nostrils
which obscured him for a moment from my sight.

(I dislike the introduction of foreign words into a
story, but the Turkish dissyllable in the foregoing sentence
is as constantly on an Eastern lip as the amber
of the pipe.)

He clapped his hands as I finished my narration,
and the Nubian appeared. Some conversation passed
between them in Turkish, and the slave tightened his
girdle, made a salaam, and, taking his slippers at the
outer door, left the shop.

We shall find her at the slave market,” said Mustapha.

I started. The thought had once or twice passed
through my mind, but I had as often rejected it as impossible.
A freeborn Zingara, and on a confidential
errand from her own mother!---I did not see how her

freedom, if there were danger, should have been so
carelessly put in peril.

“And if she is there!” said I; remembering, first,
that it was against the Mahommedan law for a Christian
to purchase a slave, and next, that the price, if it did
not ruin me at once, would certainly leave me in a situation
rather to lessen than increase my expenses.

“I will buy her for you,” said Mustapha.

The Nubian returned at this moment, and laid at my
feet a bundle of wearing apparel. He then took from
a shelf a shaving apparatus, with which he proceeded
to lather my forehead and temples, and after a short
argument with Mustapha, in which I pleaded in vain
for two very seducing clusters of curls, those caressed
minions dropped into the black hand of the slave, and
nothing was left for the petits soins of my thumb and
forefinger in their leisure hours save a well-coaxed and
rather respectable moustache. A skull-cap and turban
completed the transformation of my head, and then,
with some awkardness, I got into a silk shirt, big trowsers,
jacket, and slippers, and stood up to look at myself
in the mirror. I was as like one of the common Turks
of the street as possible, save that the European cravat
and stockings had preserved an unoriental whiteness in
my neck and ankles. This was soon remedied with
a little brown juice, and after a few cautions from
Mustapha as to my behavior, I settled my turban and
followed him into the street.

It is a singular sensation to be walking about in a
strange costume, and find that nobody looks surprised.
I could not avoid a slight feeling of mortification at
the rude manner with which every dirty Mussulman
took the wall of me. After long travel in foreign
lands, the habit of everywhere exciting notice as a
stranger, and the species of consequence attached to
the person and movements of a traveler, become
rather pleasures than otherwise, and it is not without

pain that one finds oneself once more like common
people. I have not yet returned to my own land,
(Slingsby is an American, gentle reader,) and cannot
judge, therefore, how far this feeling is modified by
the pleasures of a recovered home; but I was vexed
not to be stared at when playing the Turk at Constantinople,
and, amusing as it was to be taken for an
Englishman on first arriving in England, (different as
it is from every land I have seen, and still more different
from my own,) I must confess to have experienced
again a feeling of lessened consequence, when, on my
first entrance into an hotel in London, I was taken for
an Oxonian “come up for a lark” in term time. Perhaps
I have stumbled in this remark upon one of those
unconfessed reasons why a returned traveler is proverbially
discontented with his home.

Whether Mustapha wished to exhibit his new pipe-bearer
to his acquaintances, or whether there was fun
enough in his obese composition to enjoy my difficulties
in adapting myself to my new circumstances, I
cannot precisely say; but I soon found that we were
not going straight to the slave-market. I had several
times forgotten my disguise so far as to keep the narrow
walk till I stood face to face with the bearded
Mussulmen, who were only so much astonished at my
audacity that they forgot to kick me over the gutter;
and passing, in the bazaar of saddle-cloths, an English
officer of my acquaintance, who belonged to the
corvette lying in the Bosphorus, I could not resist the
temptation of whispering in his ear the name of his
sweetheart, (which he had confided to me over a bottle
at Smyrna,) though I rather expected to be seized
by the turban the next moment, with the pleasant consequences
of a mob and an exposure. My friend was
so thoroughly amazed, however, that I was deep in
the crowd before he had drawn breath, and I look
daily now for his arrival in England, (I have not seen

him since,) with a curiosity to know how he supposes
a “blackguard Turk” knew anything of the lock of
hair he carried in his waistcoat pocket.

The essence-seller had stopped in the book-bazaar,
and was condescendingly smoking a pipe, with his
legs crossed on the counter of a venerable Armenian,
who sat buried to the chin in his own wares, when
who should come pottering along (as Mrs. Butler would
say) but Job with his Jew behind him. Mustapha
(probably unwilling to be seen smoking with an Armenian)
had ensconced himself behind a towering
heap of folios, and his vexed and impatient pipe-bearer
had taken his more humble position on the narrow
base of one of the chequered columns which are peculiar
to the bazaar devoted to the bibliopolists. As
my friend came floundering along “all abroad” with
his legs and arms, as usual, I contrived, by an adroit
insertion of one of my feet between his, to spread him
over the musty tomes of the Armenian in a way calculated
to derange materially the well-ordered sequence
of the volumes.

“Allah! Mashallah!” exclaimed Mustapha, whose
spreading lap was filled with black-letter copies of the
Khoran, while the bowl of his pipe was buried in the
fallen pyramid.

“Bestia Inglese!” muttered the Armenian, as Job
put one hand in the inkstand in endeavoring to rise,
and with the next effort laid his blackened fingers on
a heap of choice volumes bound in snowy vellum.

The officious Jew took up the topmost copy, marked
like a cinq-foil with his spreading thumb and fingers,
and quietly asked the Armenian what Il Signore would
be expected to pay. As I knew he had no money in
his pocket, I calculated safely on this new embarrassment
to divert his anger from the original cause of his
overthrow.

“Tre colonati,” said the bookseller.

Job opened the book, and his well-known guttural
of surprise and delight assured me that I might come
out from behind the column and look over his shoulder.
It was an illuminated copy of Hafiz, with a
Latin translation,—a treasure which his heart had
been set upon from our first arrival in the East,
and for which I well knew he would sell his coat
off his back without hesitation. The desire to give
it him passed through my mind, but I could see
no means, under my present circumstances, either
of buying the book or relieving him from his embarrassment;
and as he buried his nose deeper between
the leaves, and sat down on the low counter,
forgetful alike of his dilemma and his lost friend, I
nodded to Mustapha to get off as quietly as possible,
and, fortunately slipping past both him and the
Jew unrecognized, left him to finish the loves of
Gulistan and settle his account with the incensed
Armenian.

2. II.

As we entered the gates of the slave-market, Mustapha
renewed his cautions to me with regard to my conduct,
reminded me that, as a Christian, I should see the
white female slaves at the peril of my life, and immediately
assumed, himself, a sauntering and poco-curante
manner, equally favorable to concealment and to his
interests as a purchaser. I followed close at his heels
with his pipe, and, as he stopped to chat with his acquaintances,
I now and then gave a shove with the bowl
between his jacket and girdle, rendered impatient to the
last degree by the sight of the close lattices on every side
of us, and the sounds of the chattering voices within.

I should have been interested, had I been a mere
spectator, in the scene about me, but Mustapha's unnecessary
and provoking delay, while, (as I thought possible,

if she really were in the market,) Maimuna might
be bartered for at that moment within, wound my rage
to a pitch at last scarcely endurable.

We had come up from a cellar to which one of Mustapha's
acquaintances had taken him to see a young
white lad he was about to purchase, and I was hoping
that my suspense was nearly over, when a man came forward
into the middle of the court, ringing a hand-bell,
and followed by a black girl, covered with a scant blanket.
Like most of her race (she was an Abyssinian,) her
head was that of a brute, but never were body and limbs
more exquisitely moulded. She gazed about without
either surprise or shame, stepping after the crier with
an elastic, leopard-like tread, her feet turned in like
those of the North American Indian, her neck bent
gracefully forward, and her shoulders and hips working
with that easy play so lost in the constrained dress and
motion of civilized women. The Mercury of Giovanni
di Bologna springs not lighter from the jet of the fountain
that did this ebon Venus from the ground on which
she stood.

I ventured to whisper to Mustapha, that, under cover
of the sale of the Abyssinian, we might see the white
slaves more unobserved.

A bid was made for her.

“Fifteen piastres!” said the attar-seller, wholly absorbed
in the sale, and not hearing a syllable I said to
him, “She would be worth twice as much to gild my
pastilles!” And handing me his pipe, he waddled into
the centre of the court, lifted the blanket from the slave's
shoulders, turned her round and round, like a Venus
on a pivot, looked at her teeth and hands, and after a
conversation aside with the crier, he resumed his pipe,
and the black disappeared from the ground.

“I have bought her!” he said, with a salacious grin,

as I handed him his tobacco-bag, and muttered a round
Italian execration in his ear.

The idea that Maimuna might have become the
property of that gross and sensual monster just as easily
as the pretty negress he had bought, sent my blood boiling
for an instant to my cheek. Yet I had seen this
poor savage of seventeen sold without a thought, save
mental congratulation that she would be better fed and
clad. What a difference one's private feelings make
in one's sympathies!

I was speculating, in a kind of tranquil despair, on
the luxurious evils of slavery, when Mustapha called to
him an Egyptian, in a hooded blue cloak, whom I remembered
to have seen on board the Trebisondian.
He was a small-featured, black-lipped, willowy Asiatic,
with heavy-lidded eyes, and hands as dry and rusty as
the claws of a harpy. After a little conversation, he
rose from the platform on which he had crossed his
legs, and taking my pro-tempore master by the sleeve,
traversed the quadrangle to a closed door in the best-looking
of the miserable houses that surrounded the
court. I followed close upon his heels with a beating
heart. It seemed to me as if every eye in the crowded
market-place must penetrate my disguise. He knocked,
and answering to some one who spoke from within,
the door was opened, and the next moment I found myself
in the presence of a dozen veiled women, seated in
various attitudes on the floor. At the command of our
conductor, carpets were brought for Mustapha and himself;
and, as they dropped upon their hams, every veil
was removed, and a battery of staring and unwinking
eyes was levelled full upon us.

“Is she here?” said Mustapha to me in Italian, as I
stooped over to hand him his eternal pipe.

“Dio mio! no!”

I felt insulted, that with half a glance at the Circassian

and Georgian dolls sitting before us, he could ask
me the question. Yet they were handsome! Red
cheeks, white teeth, black eyes, and youth could scarce
compose a plain woman; and thus much of beauty
seemed equally bestowed on all.

“Has he no more?” I asked, stooping to Mustapha's
ear.

I looked around while he was getting the information
I wanted in his own deliberate way; and, scarce
knowing what I did, applied my eye to a crack in the
wall, through which had been coming for some time a
strong aroma of coffee. I saw at first only a small dim
room, in the midst of which stood a Turkish manghal,
or brazier of coals, sustaining the coffee-pot from which
came the agreeable perfume I had inhaled. As my
eye became accustomed to the light, I could distinguish
a heap of what I took to be shawls lying in the centre
of the floor; and presuming it was the dormitory of one
of the slave-owners, I was about turning my head away,
when the coffee on the manghal suddently boiled over,
and at the same instant started, from the heap at which
I had been gazing, the living form of Maimuna!

“Mustapha!” I cried, starting back, and clasping
my hands before him.

Before I could utter another word, a grasp upon my
ankle, that drew blood with every nail, restored me to
my self-possession. The Circassians began to giggle,
and the wary old Turk, taking no apparent notice of
my agitation, ordered me, in a stern tone, to fill his
pipe, and went on conversing with the Egyptian.

I leaned with an effort at carelessness against the
wall, and looked once more through the crevice. She
stood by the manghal, filling a cup with a small filagree-holder
from the coffee-pot, and by the light of the
fire I could see every feature of her face as distinctly
as daylight. She was alone, and had been sitting

with her head on her knees, and the shawl, which had
now fallen to her shoulders, drawn over her till it concealed
her feet. A narrow carpet was beneath her,
and as she moved from the fire, a slight noise drew my
attention downward, and I saw that she was chained by
the ankle to the floor. I stooped to the ear of Mustapha,
told him in a whisper of my discovery, and implored
him, for the love of heaven, to get admission
into her apartment.

“Pekhe! pekhe! filio mio!” was the unsatisfactory
answer to my impatience, while the Egyptian rose and
proceeded to turn round, in the light of the window,
the fattest of the fair Circassians, from whom he had
removed every article of dress save her slippers and
trousers.

I returned to the crevice. Maimuna had drunk her
coffee, and stood, with her arms folded, thoughtfully
gazing on the fire. The expression in her beautiful
and youthful face was one I could scarcely read to my
satisfaction. The slight lips were firmly but calmly
compressed, the forehead untroubled, the eye alone
strained, and unnaturally fixed and lowering. I
looked at her with the heart beating like a hammer in
my bosom, and an impatience in my trembling limbs
which it required every consideration of prudence to
suppress. She moved slowly away at last, and sinking
again to her carpet, drew out the chain from beneath
her, and drawing the shawl once more over her
head, lay down, and sunk apparently to sleep.

Mustapha left the Circassian, whose beauties he had
risen to examine more nearly, and came to my side.

“Are you sure that it is she?” he asked, in an almost
inaudible whisper.

“Si!”

He took the pipe from my hand, and requested me,
in the same suppressed voice, to return to his shop.

“And Maimuna”—

His only answer was to point to the door, and thinking
it best to obey his orders implicitly, I made the
best of my way out of the slave-market, and was soon
drinking a sherbet in his inner apartment, and listening
to the shuffle of every passing slipper for the coming
of the light step of the Gipsy.

3. III.

The rules of good-breeding discountenance in society
what is usually called “a scene.” I detest it as
well on paper. There is no sufficient reason, apparent
to me, why my sensibilities should be drawn upon
at sight, as I read, any more than when I please myself
by following my own devices in company. Violent
sensations are, abstractly as well as conventionally,
ill-bred. They derange the serenity, fluster the manner,
and irritate the complexion. It is for this reason
that I forbear to describe the meeting between Maimuna
and myself after she had been bought for forty
pounds by the wily and worthy seller of essences and
pastilles—how she fell on my neck when she discovered
that I, and not Mustapha, was her purchaser and master—how
she explained, between her hysterical sobs,
that the Turk who had sold her to the slave-dealer was
a renegade gipsy, and her mother's brother (to whom
she had been on an errand of affection)—and how she
sobbed herself to sleep with her face in the palms of
my hands, and her masses of raven hair covering my
knees and feet like the spreading fountains of San Pietro—and
how I pressed my lips to the starry parting
of those raven tresses on the top of her fairest head,
and blessed the relying child as she slept—are circumstances,
you will allow, my dear Madam! that could
not be told passably well without moving your amiable
tenderness to tears. You will consider this paragraph,

therefore, less as an ingenious manner of disposing of
the awkward angles of my story, than as a polite and
praise-worthy consideration of your feelings and complexion.
Flushed eyelids are so very unbecoming!

4. IV.

My confidential interviews with Job began to take
rather an unpleasant coloring. The forty pounds I
had paid for Miamuna's liberty, with the premium to
Mustapha, the suit of European clothes necessary to
disguise my new companion, and the addition of a third
person in our European lodgings at Pera, rather
drove my finances to the wall. Job cared very little
for the loss of his allowance of pocket-money, and
made no resistance to eating kibaubs at a meat-shop,
instead of his usual silver fork and French dinner at
Madame Josepino's. He submitted with the same resignation
to a one-oared caique on the Bosphorus, and
several minor reductions in his expenses, thinking
nothing a hardship, in short, which I shared cheerfully
with him. He would have donned the sugar-loaf hat
of a dervish, and begged his way home by Jerusalem
or Mecca, so only I was content. But the morality of
the thing!

“What will you do with this beautiful girl when
you get to Rome? how will you dispose of her in
Paris? how will your friends receive a female, already
arrived at the age of womanhood, who shall have traveled
with you two or three years on the continent?
how will you provide for her? how educate her? how
rid yourself of her, with any Christian feeling of compassion,
when she has become irrevocably attached to
you?”

We were pulling up to the Symplegades while my
plain-spoken Mentor thrust me these home questions,
and Maimuna sat coiled between my feet in the bottom

of the caique, gazing into my face with eyes that
seemed as if they would search my very soul for the
cause of my emotion. We seldom spoke English in
her presence, for the pain it gave her when she felt
excluded from the conversation amounted in her all-expressive
features to a look of anguish that made it
seem to me a cruelty. She dared not ask me, in
words, why I was vexed; but she gathered from Job's
tone that there was reproof in what he said, and
flashing a glance of inquiring anger at his serious face,
she gently stole her hand under the cloak to mine, and
laid the back of it softly in my palm. There was a
delicacy and a confidingness in the motion that started
a tear into my eye; and as I smiled through it, and
drew her to me and impressed a kiss on her forehead,
I inwardly resolved, that, as long as that lovely creature
should choose to eat of my bread, it should be
free to her in all honor and kindness, and, if need
were, I would supply to her, with the devotion of my
life, the wrong and misconstruction of the world.
As I turned over that leaf in my heart, there crept
through it a breath of peace, and I felt that my
good angel had taken me into favor. Job began
to fumble for the lunch, and the dancing caique shot
forth merrily into the Black Sea.

“My dearest chum!” said I, as we sat round our
brown paper of kibaubs on the highest point of the
Symplegades, “you see yourself here at the outermost
limit of your travels.”

His mouth was full, but as soon as he could conveniently
swallow, he responded with the appropriate sigh.

“Six thousand miles, more or less, lie between you
and your spectacled and respectable mother; but
nineteen thousand, the small remainder of the earth's
circumference, extending due east from this paper
of cold meat, remain to you untraveled!”

Job fixed his eye on a white sea-bird apparently
asleep on the wing, but diving away eastward into the
sky, as if it were the heart within us sped onward with
our boundless wishes.

“Do you not envy him?” he asked enthusiastically.

“Yes; for nature pays his traveling expenses, and
I would our common mother were as considerate to
me! How soon, think you, he will see Trebisond,
posting at that courier speed?”

“And Shiraz, and Isaphan, and the valley of Cashmere!
To think how that stupid bird will fly over
them, and, spite of all that Hafiz, and Saadi, and Tom
Moore have written on the lands that his shadow may
glide through, will return, as wise as he went, to Marmora!
To compound natures with him were a nice
arrangement, now!”

“You would be better looking, my dear Job!”

“How very unpleasant you are, Mr. Slingsby! But
really, Philip, to cast the slough of this expensive and
il-locomotive humanity, and find yourself afloat with
all the necessary apparatus of life stowed snugly into
breast and tail, your legs tucked quietly away under you,
and, instead of coat and unmentionables to be put off
and on and renewed at such inconvenient expense, a
self-renewing tegument of cleanly feathers, brushed
and washed in the common course of nature by wind
and rain—no valet to be paid and drilled—no dressing-case
to be supplied and left behind—no tooth-brushes
to be mislaid—no tight boots—no corns—no passports
nor posthorses! Do you know, Phil, on reflection, I
find this `mortal coil' a very inferior and inconvenient
apparatus!

“If you mean your own, I quite agree with you.”

“I am surprised, Mr. Slingsby, that you, who value
yourself on knowing what is due from one highly-civilized
individual to another, should indulge in these
very disagreeable reflections!”

Maimuna did not quite comprehend the argument,
but she saw that the tables were turned, and, without
ill-will to Job, she paid me the compliment of always
taking my side. I felt her slender arm around my
neck, and as she got upon her knees behind me and
put forward her little head to get a peep at my lips, her
clear bird-like laugh of enjoyment and triumph added
visibly to my friend's mortification. A compunctious
visiting stole over me, and I began to feel that I should
scarce have revenged myself for what was, after all,
but a kind severity;

“Do you know, Job,” said I, (anxious to restore his
self-complacency without a direct apology for my rudeness,)
“do you know there is a very deep human truth
hidden in the familiar story of `Beauty and the Beast?'
I really am of opinion, that, between the extremes of
hideousness and the highest perfection of loveliness,
there is no face which, after a month's intercourse,
does not depend exclusively on its expression (or, in
other words, on the amiable qualities of the individual)
for the admiration it excites. The plainest features
become handsome unaware when associated only with
kind feelings, and the loveliest face disagreeable when
linked with ill-humor or caprice. People should remember
this when selecting a face which they are to
see every morning across the breakfast-table for the remainder
of their natural lives.”

Job was appeased by the indirect compliment contained
in this speech; and, gathering up our kibaubs,
we descended to the caique, and pulling around the
easternmost point of the Symplegades, bade adieu to
the Orient, and took the first step westward with the
smile of conciliation on our lips.

We were soon in the strong current of the Bosphorus,
and shot swiftly down between Europe and Asia,
by the light of a sunset that seemed to brighten the
West for our return. It was a golden path homeward.

The East looked cold behind; and the welcome of
our far-away kinsmen seemed sent to us on those purpling
clouds, winning us back. Beneath that kindling
horizon---below that departed sun---lay the fresh and
free land of our inheritance. The light of the world
seemed gone over to it. These, from which the day
had declined, were countries of memory---ours, of
hope. The sun, that was setting on these, was dawning
gloriously on ours.

On ordinary occasions, Job would have given me a
stave of “Hail, Columbia!” after such a burst of patriotism.
The cloud was on his soul, however.

“We have turned to go back,” he said, in a kind of
musing bitterness, “and see what we are leaving behind!
In this fairly-shaped boat you are gliding like a
dream down the Bosphorus. The curving shore of
Therapia yonder is fringed for miles with the pleasure-loving
inhabitants of this delicious land, who think a
life too short, of which the highest pleasure is to ramble
on the edge of these calm waters with their kinsmen
and children. Is there a picture in the world
more beautiful than that palace-lined shore? Is there
a city so magnificent under the sun as that in which it
terminates? Are there softer skies, greener hills,
simpler or better people, to live among, than these?
Oh, Philip! ours, with all its freedom, is a `working-day'
land. There is no idleness there! The sweat is
ever on the brow, the `serpent of care' never loosened
about the heart! I confess myself a worshipper of leisure:
I would let no moment of my golden youth go by
unrecorded with a pleasure. Toil is ungodlike, and unworthy
of the immortal spirit, that should walk unchained
through the world. I love these idle Orientals.
Their sliding and haste-forbidding slippers, their flowing
and ungirded habiliments, are signs most expressive
of their joy in life. Look around, and see how on
every hill-top stands a maison de plaisance; how every

hill-side is shelved into those green platforms,[7] so expressive
of their habits of enjoyment! Rich or poor,
their pleasures are the same. The open air, freedom
to roam, a caique at the water-side, and a sairgah on
the hill---these are their means of happiness, and they
are within the reach of all; they are nearer Utopia
than we, my dear Philip! We shall be more like
Turks than Christians in Paradise!”

“Inglorious Job!”

“Why? Because I love idleness? Are there
braver people in the world than the Turks? Are there
people more capable of the romance of heroism?
Energy, though it sound a paradox, is the child of idleness.
All extremes are natural and easy; and the
most indolent in peace is likely to be the most fiery in
war. Here we are, opposite the summer serai of Sultan
Mahmoud; and who more luxurious and idle?
Yet the massacre of the Janissaries was one of the
boldest measures in history. There is the most perfect
Orientalism in the description of the Persian beauty by
Hafiz:---

Perhaps nothing would be so contradictory as the true
analysis of the character of what is called an indolent
man. With all the tastes I have just professed, my
strongest feeling on leaving the Symplegades, for example,
was, and is still, an unwillingness to retrace my
steps. `Onward! onward!' is the perpetual cry of
my heart. I could pass my life in going from land to
land, so only that every successive one was new. Italy
will be old to us; France, Germany, can scarce lure
the imagination to adventure, with the knowledge we
have; and England, though we have not seen it, is so
familiar to us from its universality that it will not seem,
even on a first visit, a strange country. We have satiety
before us, and the thought saddens me. I hate to
go back. I could start now, with Maimuna for a
guide, and turn gipsy in the wilds of Asia.”

“Will you go with him, Maimuna?”

“Signor, no!”

I am the worst of story-tellers, gentle reader; for I
never get to the end. The truth is, that in these rambling
papers, I go over the incidents I describe, not as
they should be written in a romance, but as they occurred
in my travels: I write what I remember. There
are, of course, long intervals in adventure, filled up
sometimes by feasting or philosophy, sometimes with
idleness or love; and, to please myself, I must unweave
the thread as it was woven. It is strange how, in the
memory of a traveler, the most wayside and unimportant
things are the best remembered. You may
have stood in the Parthenon, and, looking back upon
it through the distance of years, a chance word of the
companion who happened to be with you, or the attitude
of a Greek seen in the plain below, may come up
more vividly to the recollection than the immortal
sculptures on the frieze. There is a natural antipathy
in the human mind to fulfil expectations. We wander
from the thing we are told to admire, to dwell on
something we have discovered ourselves. The child
in church occupies itself with the fly on its prayerbook,
and “the child is father of the man.” If I indulge
in the same perversity in story-telling, dear
reader,---if, in the most important crisis of my tale, I

digress to some trifling vein of speculation,---if, at the
close even, the climax seem incomplete, and the moral
vain,---I plead, upon all these counts, an adherence to
truth and nature. Life---real life---is made up of half-finished
romance. The most interesting procession of
events is delayed, and travestied, and mixed with the
ridiculous and the trifling, and at the end, oftenest left
imperfect. Who ever saw, off the stage, a five act
tragedy, with its proprieties and its climax?

3. PART III.

Ten o'clock a.m., and the weather like the Prophet's
Paradise,

Madame Josepino stood at the door of her Turco-Italian
boarding-house in the nasty and fashionable main
street of Pera, dividing her attention between a handsome
Armenian, with a red button in the top of his
black lamb's-wool cap,[8] and her three boarders, Job,
Maimuna, and myself, at that critical moment about
mounting our horses for a gallop to Belgrade.

We kissed our hands to the fat and fair Italian, and
with a promise to be at home for supper, kicked our
shovel-shaped stirrups into the sides of our horses, and
pranced away up the street, getting many a glance of

curiosity, and one or two that might be more freely
translated, from the dark eyes that are seen day and
night at the windows of the leaden-colored houses of
the Armenians.

We should have been an odd-looking cavalcade for
the Boulevard or Bond-street, but, blessed privilege of
the East! we were sufficiently comme il faut for Pera.
To avoid the embarrassment of Maimuna's sex, I had
dressed her, from an English “slop-shop” at Galata,
in the checked shirt, jacket, and trowsers of a sailor-boy,
but as she was obstinately determined that her
long black hair should not be shorn, a turban was her
only resource for concealment, and the dark and
glossy mass was hidden in the folds of an Albanian
shawl, forming altogether as inharmonious a costume
as could well be imagined. With the white duck
trowsers tight over her hips, and the jacket, which was
a little too large for her, loose over her shoulders and
breast, the checked collar tied with a black silk cravat
close round her throat, and the silken and gold fringe
of the shawl flowing coquetishly over her left cheek
and ear, she was certainly an odd figure on horseback,
and, but for her admirable riding and excessive grace of
attitude, she might have been as much a subject for a
caricature as her companion. Job rode soberly along
at her side, in the green turban of a Hajji, (which he
had persisted in wearing ever since his pilgrimage to
Jerusalem,) and, as he usually put it on askew, the
gaillard and rakish character of his head-dress, and the
grave respectability of his black coat and salt-and-pepper
trowsers, produced a contrast which elicited a
smile even from the admiring damsels at the windows.

Maimuna went caracoling along till the road entered
the black shadow of the Cemetery of Pera, and then,
pulling up her well-managed horse, she rode close to
my side, with the air of subdued respect which was

more fitting to the spirit of the scene. It was a lovely
morning, as I said, and the Turks, who are early risers,
were sitting on the graves of their kindred with their
veiled wives and children, the marble turbans in that
thickly-sown nekropolis less numerous than those of the
living, who had come, not to mourn the dead who lay
beneath, but to pass a day of idleness and pleasure on
the spot endeared by their memories.

“I declare to you,” said Job, following Maimuna's
example in waiting till I came up, “that I think the
Turks the most misrepresented and abused people on
earth. Look at this scene! Here are whole families
seated upon graves over which the grass grows green
and fresh, the children playing at their feet, and their
own faces the pictures of calm cheerfulness and enjoyment.
They are the by-word for brutes, and there is
not a gentler or more poetical race of beings between
the Indus and the Arkansaw!”

It was really a scene of great beauty. The Turkish
tombs are as splendid as white marble can make them,
with letters and devices in red and gold, and often the
most delicious sculptures, and, with the crowded closeness
of the monuments, the vast extent of the burial-ground
over hill and dale, and the cypresses (nowhere
so magnificent) veiling all in a deep religious shadow,
dim, and yet broken by spots of the clearest sunshine,
a more impressive and peculiar scene could scarce be
imagined. It might exist in other countries, but it
would be a desert. To the Mussulman death is not
repulsive, and he makes it a resort when he would be
happiest. At all hours of the day you find the
tombs of Constantinople surrounded by the living.
They spread their carpets, and arrange their simple
repast around the stone which records the name and
virtues of their own dead, and talk of them as they do
of the living and absent,—parted from them to meet
again, if not in life, in paradise.

“For my own part,” continued Job, “I see nothing
in scripture which contradicts the supposition that we
shall haunt, in the intermediate state between death
and heaven, the familiar places to which we have been
accustomed. In that case, how delightful are the habits
of these people, and how cheeringly vanish the horrors
of the grave! Death, with us, is appalling! The
smile has scarce faded from our lips, the light scarce
dead in our eye, when we are thrust into a noisome
vault, and thought of but with a shudder and a fear.
We are connected thenceforth, in the memories of our
friends, with the pestilent air in which we lie, with the
vermin that infest the gloom, with chillness, with darkness,
with disease; and, memento as it is of their own
coming destiny, what wonder if they chase us, and the
forecast shadows of the grave, with the same hurried
disgust from their remembrance. Suppose, for an instant,
(what is by no means improbable,) that the
spirits of the dead are about us, conscious and watchful!
Suppose that they have still a feeling of sympathy
in the decaying form they have so long inhabited,
in its organs, its senses, its once-admired and long-cherished
grace and proportion; that they feel the
contumely and disgust with which the features we professed
to love are cast like garbage into the earth, and
the indecent haste with which we turn away from the
solitary spot, and think of it but as the abode of festering
and revolting corruption!”

At this moment we turned to the left, descending to
the Bosphorus, and Maimuna, who had ridden a little
in advance during Job's unintelligible monologue, came
galloping back to tell us that there was a corpse in the
road. We quickened our pace, and the next moment
our horses started aside from the bier, left in a bend of
the highway with a single individual, the grave-digger,
sitting cross-legged beside it. Without looking up at
our approach, the man mumbled something between

his teeth, and held up his hand as if to arrest us in our
path.

“What does he say?” I asked of Maimuna.

“He repeats a verse of the Koran,” she replied,
“which promises a reward in paradise to him who
bears the dead forty steps on its way to the grave.”

Job sprang instantly from his horse, threw the bridle
over the nearest tombstone, and made a sign to the
grave-digger that he would officiate as bearer. The
man nodded assent, but looked down the road without
arising from his seat.

`You are but three,” said Maimuna, “and he waits
for a fourth.”

I had dismounted by this time, not to be behind my
friend in the humanities of life, and the grave-digger,
seeing that we were Europeans, smiled with a kind
of pleased surprise, and uttering the all-expressive
“Pekkhe!” resumed his look-out for the fourth
bearer.

The corpse was that of a poor old man. The coffin
was without a cover, and he lay in it, in his turban
and slippers, his hands crossed over his breast, and
the folds of his girdle stuck full of flowers. He might
have been asleep, for any look of death about him.
His lips were slightly unclosed, and his long beard was
combed smoothly over his breast. The odor of the
pipe and the pastille struggled with the perfume of the
flowers, and there was in his whole aspect a life-likeness
and peace, that the shroud and the close coffin,
and the additional horrors of approaching death, perhaps,
combine, in other countries, utterly to do away.

“Hitherto,” said Job, as he gazed attentively on the
calm old man, “I have envied the Scaligers their uplifted
and airy tombs in the midst of the cheerful street
of Verona, and, next to theirs, the sunny sarcophagus
of Petrarch, looking away over the peaceful Campagna
of Lombardy; but here is a Turkish beggar who will

be buried still more enviably. Is it not a paradise of
tombs,—a kind of Utopia of the dead?”

A young man with a load of vegetables for the
market of Pera, came toiling up the hill behind his
mule. Sure of his assistance, the grave-digger arose,
and as we took our places at the poles, the marketer
quietly turned his beast out of the road, and assisted
us in lifting the dead on our shoulders. The grave
was not far off, and having deposited the corpse on its
border, we returned to our horses, and, soon getting
clear of the cemetery, galloped away with light hearts
toward the Valley of Sweet Waters.

2. II.

We were taking breath on the silken banks of the
Barbyses,—Maimuna prancing along the pebbly bed,
up to her barb's girths in sparkling water, and Job and
myself laughing at her frolics from either side, when
an old woman, bent double with age, came hobbling
toward us from a hovel in the hill-side.

“Maimuna,” said Job, fishing out some trumpery
paras from the corner of his waistcoat pocket, “give
this to that good woman, and tell her that he who gives
it is happy, and would share his joy with her.”

The gipsy spurred up the bank, dismounted at a
short distance from the decrepit creature, and after a
little conversation returned, leading her horse.

“She is not a beggar, and wishes to know why you
give her money?”

“Tell her, to buy bread for her children,” said my
patriarchal friend.

Maimuna went back, conversed with her again, and
returned with the money.

“She says she has no need of it. There is no human
creature between her and Allah!”

The old woman hobbled on, Job pocketed his rejected
paras, and Maimuna rode between us in silence.

It was a gem of natural poetry that was worthy of
the lips of an angel.

3. III.

We kept up the Valley of Sweet Waters, tracing
the Barbyses through its bosom, to the hills; and then
mounting a steep ascent, struck across to the east, over
a country, which, though so near the capital of the
Turkish empire, is as wild as the plains of the Hermus.
Shrubs, forest-trees, and wild grass, cover the apparently
illimitable waste, and save a half-visible horse-path
which guides the traveler across, there is scarce
an evidence that you are not the first adventurer in the
wilderness.

What a natural delight is freedom! What a bound
gives the heart at the sight of the unfenced earth, the
unseparated hill-sides, the unhedged and unharvested
valleys! How thrilling it is—unlike any other joy—
to spur a fiery horse to the hill-top, and gaze away
over dell and precipice to the horizon, and never a
wall between, nor a human limit to say “Thus far
shalt thou go, and no farther!” Oh, I think we have
an instinct, dulled by civilization, which is like the
caged eaglet's, or the antelope's that is reared in the
Arab's tent; an instinct of nature that scorns boundary
and chain; that yearns to the free desert; that would
have the earth, like the sea or the sky, unappropriated
and open; that rejoices in immeasurable liberty of foot
and dwelling-place, and springs passionately back to
its freedom even after years of subduing method and
spirit-breaking confinement! I have felt it on the sea,
in the forests of America, on the desolated plains of
Asia and Roumelia; I should feel it till my heart
burst, had I the wings of a bird!

The house once occupied by Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu stands on the descent of a hill in the little village
of Belgrade, some twelve or fourteen miles from

Constantinople. It is a common-place two-story affair,
but the best house of the dozen that form the village,
and overlooks a dell below that reminds one of the
“Emerald valleys of Cashmeer.” We wandered
through its deserted rooms, discussed the clever woman
who has described her travels so graphically, and
then followed Maimuna to the narrow street, in search
of kibaubs. The butcher's shop in Turkey is as open
as the trottoir to the street, and with only an entire
sheep hanging between us and a dozen hungry beggars,
attracted by the presence of strangers, we crossed
our legs on the straw carpet, and setting the wooden
tripod in the centre, waited patiently the movements of
our feeder, who combined in his single person the
three vocations of butcher, cook, and waiter. One
must have traveled east of Cape Colonna to relish a
dinner so slightly disguised, but, once rid of European
prejudices, there is nothing more simple than the fact
that it is rather an attractive mode of feeding—a traveler's
appetite subauditur.

Our friend was a wholesome-looking Turk, with a
snow-white turban, a black, well-conditioned beard, a
mouth incapable of a smile, yet honest, and a most
trenchant and janissaresque style of handling his
cleaver. Having laid open his bed of coals with a
kind of conjurer's flourish of the poker, he slapped the
pendent mutton on the thigh in a fashion of encouragement,
and waiting an instant for our admiration to subside,
he whipped his knife from its sheath, and had out
a dozen strips from the chine (as Job expressed it in
Vermontese) “in no time.” With the same alacrity
these were cut into bits “of the size of a piece of
chalk,” (another favorite expression of Job's,) run
upon a skewer, and laid on the coals, and in three
minutes, more or less, they appeared smoking on the
trencher, half lost in a fine green salad, well peppered,
and of a most seducing and provocative savor. If you

have performed your four ablutions A.M., like a devout
Mussulman, it is not conceived in Turkey that you
have occasion for the medium of a fork, and I frankly
own, that I might have been seen at Belgrade, cross-legged
in a kibaub-shop, between my friend and the
gipsy, and making a most diligent use of my thumb
and fore-finger. I have dined since at the Rocher de
Cancale and the Traveler's with less satisfaction.

Having paid something like sixpence sterling for
our three dinners, (rather an overcharge, Maimuna
thought,) we unpicketed our horses from the long
grass, and bade adieu to Belgrade, on our way to the
Aqueducts. We were to follow down a verdant valley,
and, exhilarated by a flask of Greek wine, (which
I forgot to mention,) and the ever-thrilling circumstances
of unlimited greensward and horses that wait
not for the spur, we followed the daring little Asiatic
up hill and down, over bush and precipice, till Job
cried us mercy. We pulled up on the edge of a sheet
of calm water, and the vast marble wall, built by the
Sultans in the days of their magnificence and crossing
the valley from side to side, burst upon us like a scene
of enchantment in the wilderness.

Those same sultans must have lived a great deal at
Belgrade. Save these vast aqueducts, which are splendid
monuments of architecture, there is little in the
first aspect to remind you that you are not in the wilds
of Missouri; but a further search discloses, in the recesses
of the hidden windings of the valley, circular
staircases of marble leading to secluded baths, now
filled with leaves and neglected, but evidently on a
scale of the most imperial sumptuousness. From the
perishable construction of Turkish dwelling-houses, all
traces even of the most costly serai may easily have
disappeared in a few years, when once abandoned to
ruin; and I pleased myself with imagining, as we
slackened bridle, and rode slowly beneath the gigantic

trees of the forest, the gilded pavilions, and gay
scenes of Oriental pleasure that must have existed
here in the days of the warlike yet effeminate Selims.
It is a place for the enchantments of the “Arabian
Nights” to have been realized.

I have followed the common error in giving these
structures in the forest of Belgrade the name of aqueducts.
They are rather walls built across the deep
valleys, of different altitudes, to create reservoirs for
the supply of aqueducts, but are built with all the
magnificence and ornament of a façade to a temple.

We rode on from one to the other, arriving at last at
the lowest, which divides the valley at its wildest part,
forming a giddy wall across an apparently bottomless
ravine, as dark and impracticable as the glen of the
Cauterskill in America. Our road lay on the other
side, but though with a steady eye one might venture
to cross the parapet on foot, there were no means of
getting our horses over, short of a return of half a mile
to the path we had neglected higher up the valley.
We might swim it, above the embankment, but the opposite
shore was a precipice.

“What shall we do?” I asked.

Job made no answer, but pulled round his beast,
and started off in a sober canter to return.

I stood a moment, gazing on the placid sheet of
water above, and the abyss of rock and darkness below,
and then calling to Maimuna, who had ridden
farther down the bank, I turned my horse's head after
him.

“Signore!” cried the gipsy from below.

“What is it, Carissima?”

“Maimuna never goes back!”

“Silly child!” I answered, “you are not going to
cross the ravine?”

“Yes!” was the reply, and the voice became more

indistinguishable as she galloped away. “I will be
over before you!”

I was vexed, but I knew the self-will and temerity
of the wild Asiatic, and, very certain that, if there
were danger, it would be run before I could reach
her, I drove the stirrups into my horse's sides, and
overtook Job at the descent into the valley. We ascended
again, and rode down the opposite shore to the
embankment, at a sharp gallop. Maimuna was not
there.

“She will have perished in the abyss,” said Job.

I sprang from my horse to cross the parapet on foot,
in search of her, when I heard her horse's footsteps,
and the next moment she dashed up the steep, having
failed in her attempt, and stood once more where we
had parted. The sun was setting, and we had ten
miles to ride, and impatient of her obstinacy, I sharply
ordered her to go up the ravine at speed, and cross as
we had done.

I think I never shall forget, angry as I was at the
moment, the appearance of that lovely creature, as
she resolutely refused to obey me. Her horse, the
same fiery Arabian she had ridden from Sardis, (an
animal that, except when she was on his back, would
scarce have sold for a gold sequin,) stood with head
erect, and panting nostrils, glancing down with his
wild eyes upon the abyss into which he had been
urged,—the whole group, horse and rider, completely
relieved against the sky from the isolated mound they
occupied, and, at this instant, the gold flood of the setting
sun pouring full on them through a break in the
masses of the forest. Her own fierce attitude, and
beautiful and frowning face, the thin lip curled resolutely,
and the brown and polished cheek deepened
with a rosy glow, her full and breathing bosom swelling
beneath its jacket, and her hair, which had escaped
from the turban, flowing over her neck and shoulders,

and mingling with the loosened fringes of red and gold
in rich disorder—it was a picture which the pencil of
Martin (and it would have suited his genius) could
scarce have exaggerated. The stately, half-Arabic,
half-Grecian architecture of the aqueducts, and the
cold and frowning tints of the abyss and the forest
around, would have left him nothing to add to it as a
composition.

I was crossing the giddy edge of the parapet, looking
well to my feet, with the intention of reasoning
with the obstinate being, who, vexed at my reproaches
and her own failure, was now in as pretty a rage as
myself, when I heard the trampling of horses in the
forest. I stopped mid-way to listen, and presently
there sprang a horseman up the bank in an Oriental
costume, with pistols and ataghan flashing in the sun,
and a cast of features that at once betrayed his origin.

“A Zingara!” I shouted back to Job.

The gipsy, who was about nineteen, and as well-made
and gallant a figure for a man as Maimuna for a
woman, seemed as much astonished as ourselves, and
sat in his saddle gazing on the extraordinary figure I
have described, evidently recognizing one of his own
race, but probably puzzled with the mixture of costumes,
and struck at the same time with Maimuna's
excessive beauty. Lovely as she always was, I had
never seen her to such advantage as now. She might
have come from fairy-land, for the radiant vision she
seemed in the gold of that burning sunset.

I gazed on them both a moment, and was about
finishing my traverse of the parapet, when a troop of
mounted gipsies and baggage-horses came up the bank
at a quick pace, and in another minute Maimuna was
surrounded. I sprang to her bridle, and apprehensive
of, I scarce knew what danger, gave her one of the
two pistols I carried always in my bosom.

The gipsy chief (for such he evidently was) measured
me from head to foot with a look of dislike, and
speaking for the first time, addressed Maimuna in his
own language with a remark which sent the blood to
her temples with a suddenness I had never before
seen.

“What does he say?” I asked.

“It is no matter, Signore, but it is false!” Her
black eyes were like coals of fire, as she spoke.

“Leave your horse,” I said to her, in a low tone,
“and cross the parapet. I will prevent his following
you, and will join you on your own before you can
reach Constantinople. Turn the horses' heads homeward!”
I continued in English to Job, who was crying
out to me from the other side to come back.

Maimuna laid her hand on the pommel to dismount,
but the gipsy, anticipating her motion, touched his
horse with the stirrup, and sprang with a single leap
between her and the parapet. The troop had gathered
into a circle behind us, and seeing our retreat
thus cut off, I presented my pistol to the young chief,
and demanded, in Italian, that he should clear the
way.

A blow from behind, the instant that I was pulling
the trigger, sent the discharged pistol into the ravine,
and, in the same instant, Maimuna dashed her horse
against the unguarded gipsy, nearly overturning him
into the abyss, and spurred desperately upon the parapet.
One cry from the whole gipsy troop, and then
all was silent as the grave, except the click of her
horse's hoofs on the marble verge, as, trembling palpably
in every limb, the terrified animal crossed the
giddy chasm at a half trot, and, in the next minute,
bounded up the opposite bank, and disappeared with
a snort of fear and delight amid the branches of the
forest.

What with horror and wonder, and the shock of the

blow which had nearly broken my arm, I stood motionless
where Maimuna had left me, till the gipsy, recovering
from his amazement, dismounted and put his
pistol to my breast.

“Call her back!” he said to me, in very good Italian,
and with a tone in which rage and determination
were strangely mingled, “or you die where you stand.”

Without regarding his threat, I looked at him with
a new thought stealing into my mind. He probably
read the pacific change in my feelings, for he dropped
his arm, and the frown on his own features moderated
to a stedfast and inquisitive regard.

“Zingara!” I said, “Maimuna is my slave.”

A clutch of his pistol-stock, and a fiery and impatient
look from his fine eyes, interrupted me for an instant.
I proceeded to tell him briefly how I had obtained
possession of her, while the troop gradually
closed around, attracted by his excessive look of interest
in the tale, though they probably did not understand
the language in which I spoke, and all fixing
their wild eyes earnestly on my face.

“And now, Zingara,” I said, “I will bring her
back on one condition—that, when the offer is fairly
made her, if she chooses still to go with me, she shall
be free to do so. I have protected her, and sworn still
to protect her as long as she should choose to eat of
my bread. Though my slave, she is pure and guiltless
as when she left the tent of her mother, and is worthy
of the bosom of an emperor.”

The Zingara took my hand, and put it to his lips.

“You agree to our compact, then?” I asked.

He put his hand to his forehead, and then laid it,
with a slight inclination, on his breast.

“She cannot have gone far,” I said, and stepping on
the mound above the parapet, I shouted her name till
the woods rang again with the echo.

A moment, and Job and Maimuna came riding to

the verge of the opposite hill, and with a few words
of explanation, fastened their horses to a tree, and
crossed to us by the parapet.

The chief returned his pistols to his girdle, and
stood aside while I spoke to Maimuna. It was a difficult
task, but I felt that it was a moment decisive of
her destiny, and the responsibility weighed heavily on
my breast. Though excessively attached to her—
though she had been endeared to me by sacrifices, and
by the ties of protection---though, in short, I loved
her, not with a passion, but with an affection—as a
father more than as a lover—I still felt it to be my duty
to leave no means untried to induce her to abandon
me, to return to her own people and remain in her own
land of the sun. What her fate would be in the state
of society to which I must else introduce her, had
been eloquently depicted by Job, and will readily be
imagined by the reader.

After the first burst of incredulity and astonishment
at my proposal, she folded her arms on her bosom,
and, with the tears streaming like rain over her jacket,
listened in silence and with averted eyes. I concluded
with representing to her, in rather strong colors,
the feelings with which she might be received by my
friends, and the difficulty she would find in accomodating
herself to the customs of people, to whom not
only she must be inferior in the accomplishments of
a woman, but who might find, even in the color of that
loveliest cheek, a reason to despise her.

Her lip curled for an instant, but the grief in her
heart was stronger than the scorn for an imaginary
wrong, and she bowed her head again, and her tears
flowed on.

I was silent at last, and she looked up into my face.

“I am a burthen to you,” she said.

“No, dearest Maimuna! no! but if I were to see
you wretched hereafter, you would become so. Tell

me! the chief will make you his wife; will you rejoin
your people?”

She flung herself upon the ground, and wept as if
her heart would break. I thought it best to let her
feelings have way, and walking apart with the young
gipsy, I gave him more of the particulars of her history,
and exacted a promise that, if she should finally
be left with the troop, he would return with her to the
tribe of her mother, at Sardis.

Maimuna stood gazing fixedly into the ravine when
we turned back, and there was an erectness in her attitude,
and a fierte in the air of her head, that, I must
acknowledge, promised more for my fears than my
wishes. Her pride was roused, it was easy with half
a glance to see.

With the suddenness of Oriental passion, the young
chief had become already enamored of her, and, with
a feeling of jealousy which, even though I wished him
success, I could not control, I saw him kneel at her
feet and plead with her in an inaudible tone. She had
been less than woman if she had been insensible to
that passionate cadence, and the imploring earnestness
of the noble countenance on which she looked.
It was evident that she was interested, though she
began with scaree deigning to lift her eyes from the
ground.

I felt a sinking of the heart which I cannot describe
when he rose to his feet and left her standing alone.
The troop had withdrawn at his command, and Job,
to whom the scene was too painful, had re-crossed the
parapet, and stood by his horse's head waiting the result.
The twilight had deepened, the forest looked
black around us, and a single star sprang into the sky,
while the west was still glowing in a fast purpling gold
and crimson.

“Signore!” said Maimuna, walking calmly to my

hand, which I stretched instinctively to receive her,
“I am breaking my heart; I know not what to do.”

At this instant a faint meteor shot over the sky, and
drew its reflection across the calm mirror whose verge
we were approaching.

“Stay!” she cried; “the next shall decide the fate
of Maimuna! If it cross to the East, the will of Allah
be done! I will leave you!”

I called to the gipsy, and we stood on the verge of
the parapet in breathless expectation. The darkness
deepened around us, the abyss grew black and indistinguishable,
and the night-birds flitted past like audible
shadows. I drew Maimuna to my bosom, and
with my hands buried in her long hair, pressed her to
my heart, that beat as painfully and as heavily as her
own.

A sudden shriek! She started from my bosom, and
as she fell upon the earth, my eye caught, on the face
of the mirror from which I had forgetfully withdrawn
my gaze, the vanishing pencil of a meteor, drawn like
a beam of the sunset, from west to east!

I lifted the insensible child, impressed one long kiss
on her lips, and flinging her into the arms of the gipsy,
crossed the parapet, and rode, with a speed that tried
in vain to outrun my anguish, to Constantinople.