The year 1864 is sacred to me in that, although it called me away from St. Petersburg, where I was so happy, it also called me to my first taste—a mere glimpse—of that East which, old man as I am, still casts its spell over me. When the time came for my holiday—not till October—I had six weeks before me which I could call my own. It happened that at that moment a messenger was wanted for Constantinople; I saw my chance and volunteered. Vienna first, then down the Danube to the Black Sea. Mr. (afterwards Sir Arthur) Cowell Stepney was my companion. A wonderful journey, where language and costume carry the traveller back to the days of Trajan, and the very names of the places are full of romance. “Unde es, amice?” asks a Wallach, recognizing a friend—and invites him to sit at the same “mensa” (not “tavola” or “table”) with him, and rates the waiter because the cloth is not as “albo” (not “blanc” or “bianco”) as it should be. The peasants, shaggy, bearded and untrimmed, were dressed in tunics, fur caps, leggings and sandals, exactly like the prisoners on Trajan’s arch. Fifty years ago the Latinity had been preserved in far greater purity in Wallachia than in the true Latin countries, and poverty of communication had prevented the demon of fashion from destroying the old picturesque national costume. A troglodyte colony of Circassians at Czernavoda, burrowing in the earth like rabbits, a colony of Tartars herded in a loathsome mud town, the gift of the Sultan to the Crim Tartars, seemed like creatures from another hemisphere. Here we had some trouble with certain tatterdemalion nondescripts who represented the Turkish authorities. They wanted to open my Foreign Office bags. I rebelled; but knowing no Turkish, and they being equally ignorant of any other language, the case seemed hopeless, when all of a sudden I remembered Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. Kinglake furnished me with the word of salvation. “Eltchi, Eltchi!” I shouted, “touch my bags if you dare, you infernal scoundrels!” The last words, except as ornaments, were pleonastic as abuse generally is. “Sesame” itself had not more magic than the first. My canvas bags became an object of veneration—the great seal as sacred as that of King Solomon in the days of his glory. At Kustendji we took ship, and after a stormy passage in that cruel sea the name of which had to be changed in order to propitiate its evil demons, made our way, like Jason and his Argonauts, through the Kuaneai Symplegades, the dark, floating rocks between which the very dove that they sent out as pioneer lost her tail, and found ourselves in the Bosphorus, the identical bull’s ferry across which that wicked old god Zeus carried the lovely Europa. We were now in the midst of the scenes made famous by Homer and Hesiod; the home of gods and heroes, the land in which all the poetry and all the romance of the Western world was born.