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A GROVE AND A CISTERN 2C7 which we entered. I passed through this, and found myself in the grove of trees, the rich greenness of which I had admired already from a distance. The scene was beautiful. Under the boughs the grass was the tenderest emerald ; and a furlong beyond it, between the dark stems, shone the fresh levels of the sea. Presently I was conscious of a sound like the splashing of a small stream ; and I saw that, just under the shadow of the castle wall, was a cistern or artificial pond, full of green reflections—reflec-tions troubled at one spot only, where issuing from one of the walls a thread of water fell into it. As Moses brought water out of the rocks in Arabia, so one might fancy that water brought trees out of the rocks in Cyprus. By the side of this cistern stood a colossal sycamore-fig, almost a grove in itself, and neighboured by several others. As I rode away from the place, I noticed that for miles over the plain there came to the castle from somewhere a now broken aqueduct ; and it cannot be doubted that when in this way the supply of water was doubled, the sycamore-figs and the olives grew over a wider area, and embowered the castle in green and silvery shadow. It was a pleasant place to think about—this secluded feudal dwelling, with all its piquant incon-gruities and all its obscure associations. The count or baron, its owner, with the name of some Western family—we know how in the feudal ages his counter-parts in the West lived. We know what gloom, we

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