The deck is crowded with a strange company. There are the carousing party who broke my rest last night. They glitter from head to foot with baubles and gewgaws; but the gentlemen are unwashed and unshorn, and it is well for the ladies that their rich silk and velvet dresses do not easily show the ravages of time and smoke. They are dressed in the last fashions of Holborn or the Palais Royal, and one of the dames, I learn, is a princess, with more ducats and peasants than she can count. She spends a great part of the day adorning herself in her cabin--the centre of an admiring crowd of tinselled gallants, who assist at her toilette, with compliments and with suggestions of a naïveté quite surprising. Then there is a fat old Moldavian lady of the old school. She wears a black great-coat lined with a pale fur, and Wellington boots. Her head is swathed and bound up in many bandages. She wears thumb rings, and smokes continually. Our passengers are indeed of the most motley character, for we have quitted the excellent boats of the Danube Company, and are now on board a vessel belonging to the Austrian Lloyd’s, very inferior in size and accommodation, although built for going to sea. The first and second class passengers mingle together indiscriminately, and the whole deck is encumbered with a shouting, screaming, laughing, wrangling mass of parti-coloured humanity. There are Gallician Jew girls, going under the escort of some rascally old speculator to Constantinople, and dressed like our poor mountebank lasses, who go about on stilts at country fairs. They are a bright-eyed kindly race of gipsies and good-natured termagants, with a smile and a saucy word for everybody. Watching them, with great contempt, is a German professor, who has indiscreetly shaved the small hairs from the point of his nose till he has quite a beard on it. There is a long Austrian officer in a short cavalry cloak, who looks not unlike a stork; and there is a small Austrian officer, in a long infantry great-coat, who domineers over him, and is evidently his superior. They are an odd pair, and pace the deck together with a military dignity and precision quite comical. There is a brace of gipsies, hereditary serfs, with dark fiery eyes, rich complexions, and red handkerchiefs tied picturesquely with the striking grace in costume, which distinguished that outcast race in all countries. Then there are Greek and Armenian traders engaged in all sorts of rascally speculations connected with the war and the corn markets--sly, sharp-nosed men who have scraped together large fortunes by inconceivable dodges and scoundrel tricks; who have their correspondents and branch-houses at Marseilles, Trieste, Vienna, Paris, London, and New York; who would overreach a Jew of Petticoat Lane, and snap their fingers at him; who have all the rank vices and keen wit of a race oppressed for centuries, newly-emancipated. All power, wealth, and dominion in the Levant is passing into their hands.