Constantinople opened to Forrest a fascinating glimpse of the civilization of the East, with its ancient races of men, its strange architecture and religious rites, its poetic costumes, its impressive manners, and that glamour of mystery over all which makes Oriental life seem to the Western traveller such a contrast to everything he has been wonted to at home. He made the most of his time here in visiting the historic monuments and trying to penetrate the open secrets of Moslem habits and Turkish character; and he brought away with him, on his departure for Greece, a crowd of mental pictures which never lost their clearness or their interest. For the history of the city of Constantine has been most rich in romance; and the scene unveiled to the voyager who approaches it by daylight or by moonlight is a vision of enchantment,--a wilderness of mosques, domes, cupolas, solemn cypresses, and spouting fountains. On a beautiful day, when not a cloud was in the sky nor a ripple on the Bosphorus, Forrest was surveying the city and its environs from a boat in the midst of the bay, when he saw, slowly approaching, a sumptuous barge, with awnings of silk and gold, a banner with the crescent and inscriptions in Arabic floating above, and a group of turbaned guards, with scimitars in their hands, half surrounding a man reclined on a purple divan. "Who is that?" asked Forrest of the guide. "That is the Padishah," was the reply. Forrest, ignorant of this title of "the Shah of Shahs" for the Sultan of Turkey, understood the guide to say, Paddy Shaw! and, supposing it to be some rich Irishman who was cutting such a figure in the Golden Horn, was so struck by the absurdity that he laughed aloud. The measured strokes of the rowers, regular as a piece of solemn music, meanwhile had brought the imperial freight nearly alongside. The guards looked at the laughing tragedian as if they would have liked to chop his head off, or bowstring him and sink him in a sack. The Sultan looked slowly at the audacious American, without the slightest change of expression in his sad, dark, impassive face,--and the two striking figures, so unlike, were soon out of sight of each other forever! Passing over the notes of his tour in Greece, as covering matters now hackneyed from the descriptions given by hundreds of more recent travellers and published in every kind of literary form, a single extract from a letter to his mother is perhaps worthy of citation: