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THE STRANGE AND THE FAMILIAR 121 thing like the breast and wings of a dove, and from all the viewless gardens they summoned the smells of flowers. The grey, too, of the evening, into which the afternoons faded, instead of depressing the mind, as it sometimes does, into a mood of vapid dejection, carried with it its own subtle exhilaration. I often look back to a walk that I took along the ramparts with Colonel and Mrs. Falkland. "We came about five o'clock to what is called the Kyrenia Gate. Out-side was the Turkish cemetery—a bare enclosure surrounded by a broken wall. Far away over the great pastoral plain was a dying line of sunset be-tween two mountain ranges, and a faint gleam rested on the leaning stones under which the nameless Turkish dead were sleeping. Within . was the darkening town, with its Gothic cathedral and its look of remote Damascus. There was an odd pathos in the scene—a gentle desolation touched with a certain wildness—which caused the thoughts to enter tents and deserts, and then sent them back to the music of Grey's Elegy. The moment was full of voices and of melancholy with no pain in it. Such, then, were the scenes amongst which my life passed itself, varied by pleasant gatherings at familiar English meals, and hours of conversation in the evening. But familiar though the household life of my host and hostess was, its details were some-how transfigured by the sense of its strange sur-roundings. The English table-cloth and the silver of English salt-cellars had in my eyes a foreign

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