“How long since was it that I wrote to you of Bartlett’s visit to Constantinople? Not more than four or five weeks, it seems to me; and yet here he is, on his return from a professional trip to _Canada_, with all its best scenery snug in his portmanteau! He steamed to Turkey and back, and steamed again to America, and will be once more in England in some twenty days—having visited and sketched the two extremities of the civilized world. Why, I might farm it on the Susquehanna, and keep my town-house in Constantinople, (with money.) It seemed odd to me to turn over a drawing-book, and find on one leaf a freshly pencilled sketch of a mosque, and on the next a view of Glenmary—my turnip-field in the foreground. And then the man himself—pulling a Turkish para and a Yankee shin-plaster from his pocket with the same pinch—shuffling to breakfast in my abri on the Susquehanna, in a pair of peaked slippers of Constantinople, that smell as freshly of the bazaar as if they were bought yesterday—waking up with “_pekke! pekke!_ my good fellow!” when William brings him his boots—and never seeing a blood-red maple (just turned with the frost), without fancying it the sanguine flag of the Bosphorus or the bright jacket of a Greek! All this unsettles me strangely. The phantasmagoria of my days of vagabondage flit before my eyes again. This, ‘By-the-by, do you remember, in Smyrna?’ and, ‘The view you recollect from the Seraglio!’ and such like slip-slop of travellers, heard within reach of my corn and pumpkins, affects me like the mad poet’s proposition, ‘To twitch the rainbow from the sky, And splice both ends together.’ “I have amused my artist friend since he has been here, with an entertainment not quite as expensive as the Holly Lodge fireworks, but quite as beautiful—the burning of log-heaps. Instead of gossipping over the tea-table these long and chilly evenings, the three or four young men who have been staying with us, were very content to tramp into the woods, with a bundle of straw and a match-box; and they have been initiated into the mysteries of ‘picking and piling,’ to the considerable improvement of the glebe of Glenmary. Shelly says, ‘Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is,’