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constantly heard her mention it ; but, for some reason or other, I had conceived the idea that it would be modern and uninteresting ; that the young Govern-ment clerks, in tweed suits, who were wholly invi-sible elsewhere, would be seen sauntering there ; that Singer's sewing machines and Chocolat Menier would be advertised ; and that Huntley and Palmer's biscuits and cheap English stationery would annoy the eye in shops that aped the glass windows of Europe. I was never more mistaken. If anything in Nicosia was like the old world and a story-book, I found that amongst these things the bazaar was to be reckoned foremost ; and amongst these things it was in one way wholly singular. The rest of the town, with its mouldering ramparts, its cathedral, its mosques, and its secret tortuous streets, had shown me the past, embalmed or asleep, or ruinous. In the bazaar I found it full of animation and move-ment. Having threaded with Mrs. Falkland a labyrinth of silent alleys, we emerged suddenly, through an aperture between an old house and a minaret, into a wide street, lined with low vaulted warehouses, their arched doors being all of them wide open, and showing within a row of shadowy caverns. In the middle of the roadway donkeys were pattering to and fro ; and we almost ran against a bare-legged itinerant tinker, who was about to set up his shop at the foot of a blank wall. On either side in front of the warehouse doors the ground was littered with 106 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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