At Smyrna, I signalized my return to the land of the Franks, by ordering a beef-steak, and a bottle of porter, and bespeaking the paper from a gentleman in drab leggings, who had come from Manchester to look after the affairs of a commercial house, in which he or his employers were involved. He wondered that a hotel in the Ottoman empire should be so unlike one in Europe, and asked me, "If the inns down in the country were as good as this." As for Constantinople, I refer all readers to the industry and accuracy of Mr. White, who might justly have terminated his volumes with the Oriental epistolary phrase, "What more can I write?" Mr. White is not a mere sentence balancer, but belongs to the guild of bona fide Oriental travellers. In summer, all Pera is on the Bosphorus: so I jumped into a caique, and rowed up to Buyukdere. On the threshold of the villa of the British embassy, I met A----, the prince of attaches, who led me to a beautiful little kiosk, on the extremity of a garden, and there installed me in his fairy abode of four small rooms, which embraced a view like that of Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore; here books, the piano, the _narghile_, and the parterre of flowers, relieved the drudgery of his Eastern diplomacy. Lord N----, Mr. H----, and Mr. T----, the other attaches, lived in a house at the other end of the garden. I here spent a week of delightful repose. The mornings were occupied _ad libitum_, the gentlemen of the embassy being overwhelmed with business. At four o'clock dinner was usually served in the airy vestibule of the embassy villa, and with the occasional accession of other members of the diplomatic corps we usually formed a large party. A couple of hours before sunset a caique, which from its size might have been the galley of a doge, was in waiting, and Lady C---- sometimes took us to a favourite wooded hill or bower-grown creek in the Paradise-like environs, while a small musical party in the evening terminated each day. One of the attaches of the Russian embassy, M. F----, is the favorite dilettante of Buyukdere; he has one of the finest voices I ever heard, and frequently reminded me of the easy humour and sonorous profundity of Lablache. Before embarking the reader on the Black Sea, I cannot forbear a single remark on the distinguished individual who has so long and so worthily represented Great Britain at the Ottoman Porte. Sir. Stratford Canning is certainly unpopular with the extreme fanatical party, and with all those economists who are for killing the goose to get at the golden eggs; but the real interests of the Turkish nation never had a firmer support. The chief difficulty in the case of this race is the impossibility of fusion with others. While they decrease in number, the Rayahs increase in wealth, in numbers, and in intelligence.