imagination as the oriental bazaars. They are narrow streets, walled by the lofty houses from whose fronts project elaborate lattices, and on each side is a continuous line of shops, which are small square cells in the houses, entirely open to the street, and raised two or three feet above it. Over the whole, between the house-tops, is stretched a canopy of matting, shutting out the sky.

In the little niches, or shops, surrounded by their wares, sit the turbaned merchants, silent or chatting solemnly, smoking and sipping coffee, or bending and muttering in prayer.

A soft mellow shadow permeates the space, or golden glints of sunlight flash through the rents in the matting above. There is no noise but the hushed murmuring of a crowd, sometimes the 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 prayer-carpet 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 neighboring 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 neighbor 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 splendor. 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 colors, 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. smoke, and look resigned.

You

"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 can not wear, which are probably secondhand, and impart a peculiar odor, 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 odors 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 hacknied 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 splendors 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 and the extremest civilization, and who yet gets from the trees but a slight canoe, and from the earth but a flint, and from all the infinite suggestions of nature, nothing but a picturesque speech, so lives the Oriental, the pet of natural luxury, in a golden air, at the fountains of History, and Art, and Religion; and yet the thinnest gleanings of stripped fields would surpass his harvest.

The likeness follows into their speech and manner. The Indian still bears with him the air of silence and grandeur that inheres in his birth-place, and in the influences of his life. The sun, and the wind, and the trees have still their part in him, and assert their child. They shine, and blow, and wave through his motions