ornamented with rows of white marble columns; Swiss châlets, Japanese huts, little Moorish palaces, Turkish kiosks, whose three stories project one beyond the other, the grated galleries of their harems overhanging the Bosphorus, while little flights of stairs lead down to gardens washed by the waves. All the buildings are small, light, unsubstantial, corresponding precisely to the nature of the power wielded by those who inhabit them--the triumph of youth, the success of an intrigue, a high office which may be forfeited to-morrow, a glory doomed to end in exile, a fortune destined to evaporate, a greatness which will crumble away. There is hardly an unoccupied spot on the Bosphorus: it is like a sort of Grand Canal running through a huge rural Venice. Villas, kiosks, and palaces rise one behind the other, so placed as to leave the façade of each in view, those in the rear seeming to perch upon the roofs of those in front, while between and behind them is a mass of green, the tops and points of oaks, plane trees, maples, poplars, pines, and fig trees, through whose branches may be seen sparkling fountains and the gleaming domes of lonely türbehs and solitary mosques. [M] Arnaût-Keui, the next village, is the Anaplus of the ancients.--TRANS. Looking back at Constantinople, we can still make out, indistinctly, the Seraglio Hill and the huge dome of St. Sophia rising darkly against the gold and limpid background of the evening sky; meanwhile, Arnaût-Keui, Vani, Kulehli, Chengel, Orta have all disappeared, and our surroundings undergone an entire change. We now seem to be on an immense lake; to right and left on either shore there opens a little bay; around that on our left lies in a semicircle the pretty Greek town of Bebek shaded by lofty trees, among which stand a fine old mosque and the imperial kiosk of Humayun-Habad, where in former days the sultans used to grant secret audiences to foreign ambassadors; on one side the town is buried in the thick foliage of a little valley, on the other it climbs the steep ascent of a hill covered with oak trees and crowned by a grove famous for its echo, where the noise of a single horse’s hoofs resounds like the tramp of a regiment. The view here would throw a queen into raptures, and yet it is straight-way forgotten when we turn to look at the opposite shore. There, indeed, it is a veritable earthly paradise which is spread out before our eyes. Kandili, variegated as a town of Holland, with its white mosque and train of villas, describes a wide arc upon a bold promontory; behind it rises the flowery hill of Igiadié, crowned by a battlemented tower where a watchman is stationed to keep a lookout for any appearance of fire on either shore. Two valleys open on the bay to the right of Kandili, and quite close together, called respectively Big and Little _Blue River_, and between them are the charming grounds of the Sweet Waters of Asia,