sharp oath of a donkey driver, or the clear, vibrating call of the Muezzin.

As we move slowly through the bazaar, and our donkey-boy shouts imperatively "O old man, depart, depart! O maiden, fly! the Howadji comes, he comes, he comes!"-the merchants scan us gravely through the clouds that curl from their chibouques. But the eyes of one among them

sparkle graciously.

It is a friend of the Commander's, who purposes to take gold from the unbelievers, and at his niche we alight, and the old men and maidens fly no longer. The merchant spreads for us a prayercarpet from Bagdad, or a Persian rug, upon which we seat ourselves, while chibouques are lighted, and a small, soft-eyed Arab boy runs to the neighbouring café, and returns with rich sweet coffee.

"The Howadji are Ingleez?" is the amicable prelude of business.

"No. The Howadji are not Ingleez, but Americani.

It is a terra incognita to the swarthy Turk, who fancies it is some island in the Red Sea, or a barbaric dependence of Bagdad.

The opposite neighbour hails his brother merchant in an unknown dialect--unknown to the ear,

but the suspicious heart interprets its meaning"Allah is Allah, O my brother; praise God who has this day delivered goodly fish into thy net." The lazy loiterers gather around the spot. When they are too many, the Commander suddenly swears a vehement oath, and disperses the rabble with his kurbash, or hippopotamus whip.

The merchant, gravely courteous, reveals his treasures, little dreaming that they are inestimable to the eyes that contemplate them. His wares make poets of his customers, who are sure that the Eastern Poets must have passed life in an endless round of shopping.

Here are silk stuffs from Damascus and Aleppo. Cambric from the district of Nablous, near the well of Jacob. Gold and silver threads from Mount Lebanon. Keffie, the Bedoueen handkerchiefs from Mecca, and fabrics of delicate device from Damascus, blend their charm with the Anadolian carpets of gorgeous tissue. The fruits of Hamas hang beyond; dried fruits and blades from Celo Syria; pistacchios from Aleppo, and over them strange Persian rugs.

The eye feasts upon splendour. The wares are often clumsy, inconvenient, and unshapely. The coarsest linen is embroidered with the finest gold. It is a banquet of the crude elements of beauty,

unrefined by taste.

It is the pure pigment

unworked into the picture.

But the contemplation of these articles, of name and association so alluring; and the calm curiosity of the soft eyes, that watch you in the dimness of the bazaar, gradually soothe your mind like sleep, and you sit by the merchant in pleasant reverie. You buy as long and as much as you can. Have rhymes, and colours, and fancies prices?

The courteous merchant asks fabulous sums for his wares, and you courteously offer a tenth or a twentieth of his demand. He looks grieved, and smokes. You smoke, and look resigned.

"Have the Howadji reflected that this delicate linen fabric (it is coarse crash), comes from Bagdad, upon camels, over the desert ?"

They have, indeed, meditated that fact.

"Are these opulent strangers aware that the sum they mention would plunge an unhappy merchant into irretrievable ruin ?"

The thought severs the heart-strings of the opulent strangers. But are their resources rivers, whose sands are gold?

And the soft-eyed Arab boy is despatched for fresh coffee.

We wear away the day in this delightful traffic. It has been a rhetorical tilt. We have talked and

lived and bought poetry, and at twilight our treasures follow us to the hotel.

We discover that we have procured Oriental garments that we cannot wear, which are probably second-hand, and impart a peculiar odour, making us wonder how the plague smells. We have various beautiful caps, that heat our heads-choice Turkish slippers that tumble us down stairs-Damascus blades that break with a little bending-spices and odours of blessed Araby that we surreptitiously eject at back windows-and gold-threaded napkins of Arabian linen, that let our fingers through in the using.

Yet for these oriental luxuries we have not paid more than a dozen times their value; and when, after a surfeit of sentiment, did poets ever awake without the headache?

The solemn pomp of this oriental shopping, however, is no less pathetic than poetic. The merchant higgles in phrases of exquisite imagery, which may be, with him, only hackneyed forms of words; but are the sadder for that reason. It is not difficult to infer the characteristic influences of a people, whose natural speech is poetry. And the pathos is in the constant reference of this style of speech to a corresponding life.

Yet the Arabian genius has never attained that

life. The Thousand and One Nights are its highest literary, the Kingdom of the Caliphs, its most substantial political, and Islam, its best religious achievement. That genius creates no longer, and for the modern Muslim, only the traditions of these things remain. The poets at the cafés tell the old tales. The splendours of the Caliphat flash, a boreal brilliance, over an unreal past; and Islam wanes and withers in its sunny mosques.

Thus oriental life is an echo and a ghost. Even its ludicrousness is relieved and sobered by its necessary sadness. You are pursued by the phantom of unachieved success; you stumble among ruined opportunities; it is a sphere unoccupied, a body uninformed.

Strangely and slowly gathers in your mind the conviction that the last inhabitants of the oldest land have thus a mysterious sympathy of similarity with the aborigines of the youngest.

For what more are these orientals than sumptuous savages?

As the Indian dwells in primeval forests, whose soil teems with mineral treasure, in whose rocks and trees are latent temples greater than Solomon's and the Parthenon, and statues beyond the Greek ; in whose fruits are the secrets of trade, commerce,