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TO THE BEADEB 11 monstrances will have very little effect on him. The hopes of the optimists he will leave to the brutal refutation of events ; whilst as for the pessimists, he will content himself with saying this to them : that if the present is really nothing but a path between two cemeteries, he finds more to interest him in the full graves than in the empty ones. And now, if the reader is a traveller in my sense of the word, or if he has anything of such a traveller's interests, or sympathies, or temperament, he may perhaps be amused and pleased in acquainting him-self with the following experiences' of my own : and though the best descriptions of the writer ' are but shadows,' yet they may perhaps, if the reader's ' imagination mend them,' bring to him a breath from a land of remote mountains, rarely looked upon, except officially, by European eyes—a breath that has touched the weeds on Phoenician tombs, the marble columns of shattered Grecian temples, and Gothic towers on which once the flags of crusaders fluttered, which has borne on its breast the hoarse notes of the muezzin, and the wings of the crows that wheel round rustling palm-fronds and round minarets, which has whiffs in it of Byzantine incense, the freshness of summer seas, and the soul of the plain and of the mountain-side in a perfume of thyme and wild flowers. And in case such a reader, with t the pudicity of common sense, should, in spite of a lurking sym-pathy with me, fear that I "may lead him too far into

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