Having been invited by the officers of the frigate United States to join them in a six months’ cruise up the Mediterranean, he repaired to Leghorn, from which port the United States, with her consort the Constellation, set sail on the 3d of June, 1833. Commodore Patterson of Baltimore commanded the former ship and Captain Reed of Philadelphia the latter. Both gentlemen were accompanied by their wives and the commodore by his three beautiful daughters. These were all old friends of Willis, and he had made acquaintance with the other officers of the squadron in Italy. He could not have seen the East under pleasanter auspices, and the next half year was the richest in literary fruit of his entire sojourn upon the continent. The squadron loitered along like a pair of pleasure yachts, touching at all the more interesting ports. The bright shores of the Mediterranean and the Levant passed in a magic panorama before the eyes of the passengers, who sailed and danced and ate the lotus day after day. Elba, Naples, and Sicily; Trieste and Vienna; the Ionian Islands, Greece, and the shores of the Dardanelles were visited in turn, and at length in October the frigate dropped anchor in the Golden Horn. Willis’s “Pencillings” of Constantinople are among the best in his portfolio, among the best, indeed, that have ever been made of the surface of Oriental life. Italy was hackneyed: the Rialto and Saint Mark’s, the Coliseum and the Vatican, Pompeii and the Bay of Naples, had been described a thousand times. But here he was off the track of common tourists. His nature reveled in the barbaric riches of the East and cheerfully blinked the discomforts and the dirt. The mysteries of the seraglio and the slave market and the veiled women in the bazaars piqued his curiosity, and the poetry of the Turkish cemeteries and mosques appealed to his sentiment. He was never weary of wandering through the grand bazaar. “I have idled up and down in the dim light and fingered the soft henna, and bought small parcels of incense wood for my pastille lamp, studying the remarkable faces of the unconscious old Mussulmans, till my mind became somehow tinctured of the East, and my clothes steeped in the mixed and agreeable odors of its thousand spices.” Willis was a born shopper and had a feminine eye for the niceties not only of costume, but of upholstery, pottery, and all kinds of purchasable knick-knacks. He relished a fine appeal to his senses and his fancy all in one. So he liked to go through the street of the confectioners and taste the queer sweetmeats with flowery names, “peace to your throat” and “lumps of delight,” and to inventory the merchants’ stock in trade, their gilded saucers, brass spoons, and vases of rose water. He liked the opium-eating druggists, smoking their narghiles and fingering their spice wood beads, the edges of their jars “turned over with rich colored papers (a peculiar color to every drug), and broad spoons of box-wood crossed on the top.” He