and gentle hands, would leave the hospital with a strange cold pang a few weeks hence. I know that I should, but for the talisman of another love, the only charm I can well believe would bear man harmless through such a trial. The French hospital presented a far different sight to the English one at Scutari. Ours was dull, silent, and wretched. Grim and terrible would be almost still better words. Here I saw all was life and gaiety. The presence of those neat, active, kindly women had done much. The innate joyousness of the French character had done more. There were my old acquaintances, the French soldiers, playing at dominoes or écarté, by their bed-sides, and twisting paper cigarettes, or disputing together just as I have seen them anywhere else from Paris to Constantinople or Bona. I liked also to listen to the agreeable manner in which the doctor spoke to them. "Mon garçon," or "Mon brave," quite lit up when he came near with his humane and brotherly interest in them. I could not help noticing it. My acquaintance smiled"It is not only as you observe,” he said, “ a national peculiarity with us to address persons in humble life with tenderness, but in the army we are especially instructed to do so." The Sisters of Charity, however, spoke to the wounded in a manner which was still more happy and French. Their voices must have sounded to many a poor fellow with a lively imagination, like a foretaste of the glory and consideration he would meet with in his own village. Every word seemed to express such a true admiration for valour, such a gentle and special interest in the excellent enfant addressed, such a sweet readiness to listen to the slightest whisper from his parched lips, and such unwearied activity in ministering to the smallest of his wants. God bless those women, what a mission of mercy they are fulfilling now!

Hark to the deep roar of the guns as they come booming over the sulky waters and through the heavy air. My companion pauses. "It is for the death of Marshal St. Arnaud," he says; "his strange career is ended." And indeed it was so. The commander-in-chief of the French troops had died on his passage from the tents which are still menacing Sebastopol. It was said that he died of cholera, but that in reality had only shortened, by a few days, a life

already hastening to its close. The fiat of the physician had gone before, and the French chief knew death to be so near, that in the battle which took place, not many hours before his death, he dared all manner of danger, seeking for a soldier's grave in the field, and it was denied him.

CHAPTER XI.

The Black Sea. The commissariat again. Army contractors. Refractory peasants bound for the goal of glory. The brave blue jackets. Miss Nightingale. Lady Stratford. Rambling Scutari. Leander's tower. The Bosphorus steamers. Rabble rout of a sea-port. An officer's widow. Unloading the transports. The Austrian Lloyd. The Stamboul. The British officer is hunted to the last by energetic laquais de place. Eastern delays. The villages of the Bosphorus. The palace of Sardanapalus. Diplomatic Therapia. Cockney Buyukdère. Reflections. Metaphysics taught by Pistacchio nuts. Hints for the outward-bound. The true use of the nose. Breakfast. Travellers' books. Appearance of the coast. Dishonest conduct of an Austrian Lloyd's officer. Amateur inspectors of the road.

Now swiftly over the sulky December waters, past many a battered hulk which shows sad signs of the wild hurricanes in the Black Sea; past transport-ships by the score, and smug oily commissariat officers a little the worse for yesterday's dinner and evening entertainment, but keeping good hope of an appetite again by-and-by at the hospitable board of a contractor; past barges with a score of extremely dirty fellows in fezzes and baggy breeches, toiling at a multitude of oars, and slowly labouring along towards some ship bound for Sebastopol, there to give up their dismal and disheartened cargo of astounded and refractory peasants from the far away interior, and who are bound, chiefly against their wills, for the goal of glory.

Away past men-of-war with jovial officers chatting to admiring visitors over the ship's side, and making but light of the dangers they bore so nobly yesterday, and will court again to-morrow.

One's very heart warms towards the blue jackets, and

one cannot help contrasting their frank, open, fearless looks with the anxious, sly, shuffling demeanour of those feasting commissariat gentry who pulled on in stealthy talk with the wily merchant just now.

And salutes are firing from ship and battlement, and gentle ladies of high degree flit swiftly by us in their gilded boats to visit the sick at Scutari. I vow and declare there goes Miss Nightingale, and yonder in the grand official caique floats kind Lady Stratford and her daughters fair.

They are braving wind and weather, as they have been doing ever so long on the same good errand-to carry to the sad couch of the wounded in a distant land the meet tribute of woman's sympathy and admiration.

Let us look our last at a scene which has surely grown on my mind like affection for a friend. There stands rambling Scutari dismal enough, though the neighbourhood around is beautiful. Yonder is Leander's tower, with its sweet legend of captive beauty and conquering love. There is the ricketty old wooden bridge, my favourite walk so long; there go fussing and puffing away the busy little steamers for Therapia, and the villages of the Bosphorus.

I see through my glass that the shore is as usual, crowded with a rabble rout of Greeks, Jews, Armenians, sailors, soldiers, tinkers, tailors, suttlers, gaily-dressed young ladies of forward demeanour, and all the dirty crowd of a seaport.

There some tearful widow, who has left her world behind her on the hard-fought field or beneath the stormy sea, is being assisted into a boat by some kind friend, whose stout arm is, may be, trembling almost as much as the weak pale hand which is laid upon it. She is going on board the English steamer, and is about to return to her mockery of a home, now lonely ever more, in the fatherland. She will keep holy the memory of the brave man whose living love was hers, and who died, may be, with her name the last words upon his lips after the forward shout of battle.

There are horses embarking and disembarking, and fat bales of costly merchandize, toiling along near the smart boats of sea-captains, and the flashing caiques of pashas or minisHere raves a Frenchman, there roars a German,

ters.

or yells a Greek, and the shrill boatswains whistle o'er the deep.

I have ever been of opinion, as gentle Goldsmith says, that a steamer is, upon the whole, as dirty and inconvenient a place of abode as need be; but of all the steamers with which it was ever my misfortune to become acquainted, I have not the smallest hesitation in asserting that the Austrian Lloyd boat, the Stamboul, plying between Varna and Constantinople, is by very many chalks the dirtiest and

most inconvenient.

I scrambled, and tumbled, and slipped, through a variety of people and things, however, and got footing on it at last. The decks were cleared of laquais de place, who had been forgotten, and who had come to claim some preposterous little account which had been forgotten too, according to the custom of their tribe. The last Greek huckster had given his last wily counsel to his supercargo, and the last Jew had wrangled with the last boatman, who, Greek as he was, wearied soon in the contest. We are off!

Oh, no! We should have been off anywhere but in Turkey; as it is, however, we beat about for several hours in the cheerfulest and most obliging manner, to wait for some impossible person, who finally appears to change his mind and decline making the voyage with us.

It is the dusk of the evening, therefore, when we at last flit rattling down the Bosphorus, and already our keel leaves a bright track of phosphoric light over the darkening sea, like the steps of a water fairy.

Away past the sweet villages on the shore, where I have whiled away so many an enchanted summer afternoon, their ghosts seem to haunt me reproachfully. Away past tower and fort, and sleepy hollow; by the low rambling picturesque wooden houses of the great pashas, with their barred and guarded harems, and by quiet cemeteries with their turbaned dead; by the palace which Sardanapalus is building, and by the ancient tomb of the famous Lesbian Admiral Barbarossa, the conqueror of Algiers; past diplomatic Therapia and Cockney Buyukdère, and so out into the Black Sea, as the moon rises mournfully and mistily.

There is something about that moon which I cannot bear to-night, lest a full heart should run over; for I have been two years, or thereaway, in the East, and two years are quite an era in the life of the mind and the affections.

I remember well with what fine hopes, cheerful and earnest, I then saw the seven-hilled city rise from the golden waters, as we bore in after a stormy voyage one bright spring morning. I reflect with a sigh that is well nigh stifling, how those hopes have turned to ashes one by one. But who among us can look back on such a multitude of days quite calmly? And the fact is, I am by no means certain that disappointment is not the salt of life! What a weary world it would be, oh, dear! if everything always went on happening just as we had foreseen, and we made our own fate every time we had a fit of indigestion ! I mention this period because, I take it, a man is wiser then than at other times, and more inclined to "make his fate." When he is quite at his ease he does not think much about it, and that is far the best way. A German philosopher used to say that a boar's head and Pistacchio nuts taught metaphysics better than all the wrangling in the schools. Perhaps, however, on the whole, it is quite as well not to inconvenience oneself by the acquisition of knowledge on such terms.

The captain of our steamer is a gaunt melancholy Don Juan sort of man, and I see that he has been alarmed by the late accidents on these coasts. So have we, and it is therefore with some inward satisfaction, though we would scorn to express it, that we see he is making all taut and trim in case of a sudden storm in the night. Some light skirmishing clouds to the northward look rather like mischief; but suppose we

go down stairs and have our supper. We shall find, to be sure, nothing, but a rather powerful species of cheese; however, that is better than nothing, and a short pipe with some brandy and water afterwards, will quite warm our noses, which are cold, and I am sorry to think have been so for some time. And here I wish to improve the occasion, by hinting to the docile traveller, that one of the most dangerous things he can allow to occur to himself in Turkey is in any way to get chilled. I would also suggest that the nose, especially if long, is an excellent natural thermometer