The gifts of nature remain; he was especially struck with the trees. "We traversed the coast," he says, "through woods of the richest trees, the planes being the handsomest to be found in this or perhaps any other part of the world. I have never seen such stupendous arms to any trees." Everything was running wild; "the underwood was of myrtle, growing sometimes twenty feet high, the beautiful daphne laurel, and the arbutus; and they seemed contending for preeminence with the vine, clematis, and woodbine, which climbed to the very tops, and in many instances bore them down into a thicket of vegetation, impervious except to the squirrels and birds, which, sensible of their security in these retreats, stand boldly to survey the traveller." Elsewhere he found the ground carpeted with the most beautiful flowers. A Protestant Missionary,[51] in like manner, travelling in a different part of the country, speaks of the hedges of wild roses, the luxuriant gardens and fruit-trees, principally the cherry, the rich soil, the growth of beech, oak, and maple, the level meadows and swelling hills covered with the richest sward, and the rivulets of the purest water. No wonder that, as he tells us, "sitting down under a spreading walnut-tree, by the side of a murmuring mill stream, he was led by the charming woodland scenery around to reflect upon that mysterious Providence, by which so beautiful a country has been placed under such a blighting government, in the hands of so ignorant and barbarous a people." The state of the population is in keeping with the neglected condition of the country. It is, down to the present time, wasting away; and that there are inhabitants at all seems in the main referable to merely accidental causes. On the road from Angora to Constantinople there were old people, twenty years since, who remembered as many as forty or fifty villages, where now there are none; and in the middle of the last century two hundred places had become forsaken in the tract lying between those two cities and Smyrna.[52]