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more curious still, amongst the by-lanes, in which I constantly lost myself, used as barns or stables, or places for dogs to litter in, but still covered with carving and beautiful with their pointed windows, one after another I came on mediajval churches—re-mains of the three hundred for which Nicosia once was celebrated. And over all was the living and liquid sunlight, sharpening every outline with its broad washes of shadow, filling here and there a window or arch with midnight and giving to every scene a constantly changing character. Sometimes a familiar wall would become a new thing, as a bough laden with leaves or with almond blossoms hung illuminated over it. Sometimes in the crowded bazaar, at the end of one of its dim passages, the eye would suddenly catch the crags of the far-off mountains ; and constantly in some narrow, shadowy street, where the tops of the houses were black with their projecting roofs, I stood ar-rested by the sight of the blue sky at the end of it—an oblong of lapis lazuli inlaid with a dark cypress tree. I should, however, convey a very incomplete impression if I spoke of Nicosia only as it appeared on the days of sunshine ; for though certainly sunshine, at once soft and brilliant, was the rule, clouds and showers wrere exceptions hardly rare enough to be remarkable. But clouds in that won-derful climate seemed seldom to have any gloom in them. They were as fresh and wTarm in January as thej7 are with us in June. They hovered over every- 120 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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