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yesterday, my eye was caught first by a scutcheon let into a wall, and presently by another surmounting a crumbling doorway! Then I detected others, broken or half obliterated. They started from their obscurity, and showed themselves in quick succession. What I fancied had been romance was reality after all. I was actually walking through the remains of the mediaeval palaces I had been reading about; and the existing houses were built upon their foundations. But the wonder of the morning was yet to come. The special object of my walk was a mosque, which had once been the cathedral the only important structure of which I had as yet heard anything definite. Nothing that I had heard, however, had at all prepared me for the reality. After many turn,s and windings I arrived, under Scotty's guidance, at an open square, with old stone buildings surrounding it and a Gothic fountain in the middle; and close to one of the sides, with pinnacles and flying buttresses, i mass of windowed masonry which impressed me like York Minster. As it suddenly burst on one itire aspect was English. It was not till a little later that the eye took note of the differences. I went slowly round it. For one half of the circuit a road, practicable for vehicles, passed actually through the buttresses, whose arches flung a succession of shadows over it. Every shy corner showed some detail of architectural beauty. No cathedral in England could show more. What struck me most, however, was the great western front, across the whole of which ran a lofty and magnificent portico. The groined roof of this rested on a series of fluted columns, in which were empty niches once filled with statues, and three tall doors of equal size opened from it into the aisles within.
Here I set up my camera; and I had, whilst selecting 'the best point of view, a good opportunity of watching a stream of worshippers who at short intervals were passing in to their devotions. The dress of some of them was semi-European, but they had for the most part turbans and loose robes. What could their business be, my English mind asked the business of these strange figures within these familiar-looking doors? My eye instinctively looked for a gowned verger extracting a halfcrown from some pleased sight-seeing clergyman, and for demure young ladies mincing in with their prayerbooks and parcels of slippers hidden under their arms for the curate. But before the doors barbarous curtains hung, marked not with crosses, but huge cabalistic symbols ; and when these were pushed aside, and a faint sound came from within, it was not the roll of an organ or the flute-like response of choristers, but some long-drawn, hoarse modulation, ending with the name of Allah.
When I had done with my photography I strolled to a distance and again surveyed the pile. I now saw that, in addition to its other ornamentation, it, like the old street walls, was covered with coats of arms, one of which caught my eye for a very curious reason: it was identical with that of an extinct Devonshire family the Pynes of Axmouth which in the fifteenth century was connected by marriage with my own, and which, along with my own, has not a few of its members lying side by side under the flag-stones of Axmouth Church. The same device, the same three pine-cones there looks down upon homely village faces, old-fashioned square pews, and the flowers of Sunday bonnets, which here, amongst alien races, has all its shadows sharpened, by the sky that bends over Paphos, and is cut by the shafts of minarets.
I had plenty of time that afternoon to ruminate over these impressions, and I also received others of a quite different character. Mrs. Falkland took me about four o'clock to call on one of the judges who lived beyond the walls. We went by a broad road bordered with eucalyptus, which presently took us past the British Government's offices, and showed us, a mile or so off, the tiled residence of the governor on a small eminence, with more eucalyptus sheltering it. Since I had left the pier at Larnaca these were absolutely the first signs I had met by which Western civilizacion made the fact of its presence public. In numerous ways, no doubt, England has done much for Cyprus ; but, with rare exceptions, such as these which I now speak of, it has regulated and improved the conditions of native life without producing the least alteration in their character, and a man might wander for days upon days in Nicosia before he encountered a single English face. It is true that on the road we were now traversing clerks and officials the whole of them few in number were at stated times to be seen going to or from their work; but, except at such times, whatever life might be stirring, as I found this afternoon, was even here entirely Oriental.
The judge's house, however, which stood at some distance from the road, was amongst the objects tainted with Western progress. It was a stone vilhi in fact, which had only been built yesterday, with English grates and a porch like afe English parsonage. It seemed to profane the landscape, and I was sorry I had set eyes on it till, after a minute or two spent indoors, we were taken out into the garden, and back we were plunged again into all the strangeness of Cyprus, which here showed itself in a fresh and delightful form. The garden

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