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found the streets already crowded, and the merchants and artificers as busy as at noon. Turning a corner to get out of the way of a row of butchers, who were slaughtering sheep revoltingly in front of their stalls, we met two old Turks coming from the mosque, one of whom, with the familiarity of manners which characterizes the nation, took from my hand a stout English riding-whip which I carried, and began to exercise it on the bag-like trowsers of his friend. After amusing himself a while in this manner, he returned the whip, and, patting me condescendingly on the cheek, gave me two figs from his voluminous pocket, and walked on. Considering that I stand six feet in my stockings, an unwieldy size, you may say, for a pet, this freak of the old Magnesian would seem rather extraordinary. Yet it illustrates the Turkish manners, which, as I have often had occasion to notice, are a singular mixture of profound gravity and the most childish simplicity.

We found a few fine old marble columns in the porches of the mosques, but one Turkish town is just like another, and after an hour or two of wandering about among the wooden houses and narrow streets, we returned to the khan, and with a cup of coffee, mounted and resumed our journey.

I have never seen a finer plain than that of Magnesia. With an even breadth of seven or eight miles, its length cannot be less than fifty or sixty, and throughout its whole extent it is one unbroken picture of fertile field and meadow, shut in by two lofty ranges of mountains, and watered by the full and winding Hermus. Without fence, and almost without human habitation, it is a noble expanse to the eye, possessing all the untrammelled beauty of a wilderness without its detracting inutility. It is literally "clothed with flocks." As we rode on under the eastern brow of Mount Sipylus, and struck out more into the open plain, as far as we could distinguish by the eye, spread the snowy sheep in hundreds, at merely separating distances, checkered here and there by a herd of the tall jet-black goats of the East, walking onward in slow and sober procession, with the solemn state of a funeral. The road was lined with camels coming into Smyrna by this grand highway of nature, and bringing all the varied produce of Asia Minor

to barter in its busy mart. We must have passed a thousand in our day's journey.

LETTER IV.

THE EYE OF THE CAMEL ROCKY SEPULCHRES-VIRTUE OF AN OLD PASSPORT BACKED BY IMPUDENCE-TEMPLE OF CYBELEPALACE OF CROESUS-ANCIENT CHURCH OF SARDIS-RETURN TO SMYRNA.

UNSIGHTLY as the camel is, with its long snaky neck, its frightful hump, and its awkward legs and action, it wins much upon your kindness with a little acquaintance. Its eye is exceeding fine. There is a lustrous, suffused softness in the large hazel orb that is the rarest beauty in a human eye, and so remarkable is this feature in the camel, that I wonder it has never fallen into use as a poetical simile. They do not shun the gaze of man, like other animals, and I pleased myself often, when the suridjee slackened his pace, with riding close to some returning caravan, and exchanging steady looks in passing with the slow-paced camels. It was like meeting the eye of a kind old man.

The face of Mount Sipylus, in its whole extent, is excavated into sepulchres. They are mostly ancient, and form a very singular feature in the scenery. A range of precipices, varying from one to three hundred feet in height, is perfo rated for twenty miles with these airy depositaries for the dead, many of them a hundred feet from the plain. Occasionally they are extended to considerable caves, hewn with great labour in the rock, and probably, from their numerous niches, intended as family sepulchres. They are now the convenient eyries of great numbers of eagles, which circle continually around the summits, and poise themselves on the wing along the sides of these lonely mountains in undisturbed security.

We arrived early in the afternoon at Casabar, a pretty town at the foot of Mount Tmolus. Having eaten a melon, the only thing for which the place is famous, we

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proposed to go on to Achmet-lee, some three hours farther. The suridjee, however, whose horses were hired by the day, had made up his mind, to sleep at Casabar; and so we were at issue. Our stock of Turkish was soon exhausted, and the hajji was coolly unbuckling the girths of the baggagehorse, without condescending even to answer our appeal with a look. The Mussulman idlers of the café opposite took their pipes from their mouths and smiled. The gay cafejee went about his arrangements for our accommodation, quite certain that we were there for the night. I had given up the point myself, when one of my companions, with a look of the most confident triumph, walked up to the suridjee, and, tapping him on the shoulder, held before his eyes a paper with the seal of the pasha of Smyrna in broad characters at the top. After the astonished Turk had looked at it for a moment, he commenced in good round English and poured upon him a volume of incoherent rhapsody, slapping the paper violently with his hand and pointing to the road. The effect was instantaneous. The girth was hastily rebuckled, and the frightened suridjee put his hand to his head in token of submission, mounted in the greatest hurry, and rode out of the court of the caravanserai. The cafejee made his salaam, and the spectators wished us respectfully a good journey. The magic paper was an old passport, and our friend had calculated securely on the natural dread of the incomprehensible, quite sure that there was not more than one man in the village that could read, and none short of Smyrna who could understand his English.

The plain between Casabar and Achmet-lee is quite a realisation of poetry. It is twelve miles of soft, bright green-sward, broken only with clumps of luxuriant oleanders, an occasional cluster of the "black tents of Kedar" with their flocks about them, and here and there a loose and grazing camel indolently lifting his broad foot from the grass as if he felt the coolness and verdure to its spongy core. One's heart seems to stay behind as he rides onward through such places.

The village of Achmet-lee consists of a coffee-house with a single room. We arrived about sunset, and found the fire-place surrounded by six or seven Turks, squatted on their hams, travellers like ourselves, who had arrived before

us. There was fortunately a second fireplace, which was soon blazing with fagots of fig and oleander, and, with a pillan between us, we crooked our tired legs under us on the earthen floor, and made ourselves as comfortable as a total absence of every comfort would permit. The mingled smoke of tobacco and the chimney drove me out of doors as soon as our greasy meal was finished, and the contrast was enough to make one in love with nature. The moon was quite full, and pouring her light down through the transparent and dazzling sky of the East with indescribable splendour. The fires of twenty or thirty caravans were blazing in the fields around, and the low cries of the camels, and the hum of voices from the various groups, were mingled with the sound of a stream that came noisily down its rocky channel from the nearest spur of Mount Tmolus. I walked up and down the narrow camel-path till midnight; and if the kingly spirits of ancient Lydia did not keep me company in the neighbourhood of their giant graves, it was perhaps because the feet that trod down their ashes came from a world of which Croesus and Abyattis never heard. The sin of late rising is seldom chargeable upon an earthen bed, and we were in the saddle by sunrise, breathing an air that, after our smoky cabin, was like a spice-wind from Arabia. Winding round the base of the chain of mountains which we had followed for twenty or thirty miles, we ascended a little, after a brisk trot of two or three hours, and came in sight of the citadel of ancient Sardis, perched like an eagle's nest on the summit of a slender rock. A natural terrace, perhaps a hundred feet above the plain, expanded from the base of the hill, and this was the commanding site of the capital of Lydia. Dividing us from it ran the classic and "golden-sanded" Pactolus, descending from the mountains in a small, narrow valley, covered with a verdure so fresh, that it requires some power of fancy to realise that a crowded empire ever swarmed on its borders. Crossing the small, bright stream, we rode along the other bank, winding up its ascending curve, and dismounted at the ruins of the Temple of Cybele, a heap of gigantic fragments strown confusedly over the earth, with two majestic columns rising lone and beautiful into the air.

A Dutch artist, who was of our party, spread his

drawing-board and pencils upon one of the fallen Ionic capitals; the suridjee tied his horses' heads together, and laid himself at his length upon the grass, and the rest of us ascended the long steep hill to the citadel. With some loss of breath, and a battle with the dogs of a gipsy encapment, hidden so as almost to be invisible among the shrubbery of the hill-side, we stood at last upon a peak, crested with one tottering remnant of a wall, the remains of a castle, whose foundations have crumbled beneath it. It looks as if the next rain must send the whole mass into the valley.

It puzzled my unmilitary brain to conceive how Alexander and his Macedonians climbed these airy precipices, if taking the citadel was a part of his conquest of Lydia. The fortifications in the rear have a sheer descent from their solid walls of two or three hundred perpendicular feet, with scarce a vine clinging by the way. I left my

companions discussing the question, and walked to the other edge of the hill, overlooking the immense plains below. The tumuli which mark the sepulchres of the kings of Lydia rose like small hills on the opposite and distant bank of the Hermus. The broad fields, which were once the "wealth of Croesus," lay still fertile and green a ong the banks of their historic river. Thyatira and Philadelphia were almost within reach of my eye, and I stood upon Sardis in the midst of the sites of the Seven Churches. Below lay the path of the myriad armies of Persia, on their march to Greece: here Alexander pitched his tents after the battle of Granicus, whiling away the winter in the lap of captive Lydia; and over the small ruin just discernible on the southern bank of the Pactolus, "the angel of the church of Sardis " brooded with his protecting wings, till the few who had "not defiled their garments were called to "walk in white," in the promised reward of the Apocalypse.

We descended again to the Temple of Cybele, and mounting our horses rcde down to the Palace of Croesus. Parts of the outer walls, the bases of the portico, and the marble steps of an inner court, are all that remain of the splendour that Solon was called upon in vain to admire. With the permission of six or seven storks, whose coarse nests were built upon the highest points of the ruins, we selected the