The quarantine regulations are very troublesome in almost all parts of the Mediterranean. The people in this quarter are always afraid of contagious diseases, particularly the plague, which in former days committed terrible ravages. The quarantine on vessels from the Levant, or the eastern part of the Mediterranean, sometimes lasts for forty days. This restriction, when applied to ships from the United States, is very useless and absurd; yet it is rigidly enforced, for these people have heard that a contagious disease, called the yellow fever, sometimes prevails in America, and as they have little knowledge of geography, they make hardly any distinction between one portion of the western continent and another. The quarantine therefore is laid upon all vessels from America. We found ourselves in company with fifteen or twenty other vessels performing quarantine, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Austrian and Greek. There was an Austrian brig, loaded with beans from Alexandria in Egypt. She had forty days quarantine, and as the weather was rainy and the vessel’s deck leaked, the captain was afraid his cargo would sprout and shoot up into a forest of bean-stalks before he could get it on shore. It was now the first of February, a season when, by our recollection, the country at home must be covered with snow; yet here we found the fields green, the air soft, and the trees in full foliage. The oranges were just ripening, and the Maltese boatman brought them to us on board for four cents a dozen. The Malta oranges are famed for being the finest in the world, and I must admit that they are worthy of their reputation. The oranges we get in Boston are gathered before they are quite ripe, that they may keep the better; but an orange in full ripeness, fresh plucked from the tree, as far surpasses the imported fruit, as a ripe apple does a green one. We had, besides, dried figs strung upon reeds, somewhat in the manner in which we prepare dried apples. Here I saw for the first time the pomegranate, a fruit larger than an orange, full of little sweet kernels. So we contented ourselves with eating fresh fruit and wishing the quarantine at an end. (_To be continued._) The New Custom-House, Boston. Between Long and Central wharves, in Boston, a large edifice is now in progress, called the New Custom-House. A picture of it as it will be when finished, engraved by Mr. Devereux, whose office you will find at No. 47 Court street, is given on the opposite page. The building is of granite, and already it may be seen that it is to be one of the finest structures in the city. The lofty fluted columns have already an imposing effect. They are thirty-two feet in length, and weighed forty-three tons each--they were obtained in one of the quarries at Quincy. It required forty or fifty yoke of oxen to bring one of these enormous pillars to the city. [Illustration: _New Custom-House, Boston._]