the stream jumped by before us as we took our evening's repose. And repose it is to sit thus at the close of a day of travel, to enjoy the view of the lovely regions given man to dwell in; to see the various changes time, circumstances, and religion have wrought in the family of Adam, or, as the Arabs say, in the Beni Adam. It was a lovely evening; and as I reclined apart from my more gregarious fellow-travellers, I felt 'That the night was filled with music, And the cares that infested the day Had folded their tents, like the Arab, And as silently stolen away.'" From Naringa our route lies eastward over low undulated hills, still marked by frequent _tels_, generally surmounted by a village. "Are these mounds natural, or does man still fondly cling to the ruined home of his fathers?" Crossing the river Kirsan, we arrive at Nezeeb, lying among vineyards and plantations of figs, pistachios, and olives, interspersed with fields of wheat. At this village the Sultan's forces, 70,000 strong, were defeated by Ibrahim Pasha with 45,000 men--a bootless victory, soon neutralised by a few lines from our "Foreign Office." On the 6th day after leaving Aleppo, we find ourselves on the Euphrates, the _Mourad Shai_, or "Water of desire."[14] [14] The Moslems being water-drinkers, are as curious about their streams as _bons vivans_ are about their cellars. One of the Caliphs sent to weigh all the waters in his wide kingdom, and found that of the Euphrates was the lightest. "In all its majesty, it glides beneath our gaze. It is needless to tell the history of this river, renowned in the earliest traditions. Watering the Paradise of earth, it has been mingled with the fables of heaven; the Lord gave it in his covenants unto Abram; Moses, inspired, preached it in his sermon to the people. In its waters are bound the four angels, and, at the emptying of the sixth vial, its waters will dry up, that the 'way of the kings of the East may be prepared.' In every age it has formed a prominent feature in the diorama of history, flashing with sunshine, or sluggish and turbid with blood; and here, on its bank, its name unchanged, all now is solitude and quiet.