It was a glorious scene! And we were soon upon the bosom of the blue waters, darting along, with the wild birds above our heads, out into the Sea of Marmora. Europe was beside and behind us—Europe, with its palaces, its politics, and its power—and the shadowy shore of Asia, with its cypress-crowned heights, and its dusky mountains, seemed to woo our approach. How I regretted that the passage was so brief—a few strokes of the oar, a few pulsations of the heart, after we had shot past the “Maiden’s Tower,” and we were landed beside the ruined mosque, in the valley beyond the Persian Kiosk of the Sultan, which crowns the crest of the highest hill. The land curved gracefully downward at this point to form a fair green glen, where a group of plane trees and acacias threw their long branches over the remains of the crumbling temple. Here and there a solitary cypress shot up its dark head like a death-lance into the clear horizon, contrasting its funereal and gloomy pomp with the laughing clusters of the pink-blossoming almond-trees, which were scattering their petals over the grave-stones that rose on the side of the grassy bank amid the wild flowers, as if to link the present with the past. It is a beautiful custom, that of burying the dead upon the very path of the living! It destroys so much of the gloom which imagination is prone to drape about the grave—it creates so much more of a common interest. The Turk smokes his chibouk with his back resting against a turban-crested grave-stone; the Greek spreads his meal upon a tomb; the Armenian shelters himself from the sunshine beneath the boughs that overshadow the burial-places of his people; the women sit in groups, and talk of their homes and of their little ones among the ashes of their ancestors; and the children gather the wild flowers that grow amid the graves, as gaily as though death had never entered there. The caïque soon darted into the little bay, and we trod the shore of Asia. Immediately in front of us, on the European coast, stretched the long castellated wall of the ancient city of Constantine, with its Seven Towers, and its palace-girdled Point. Nothing could be more beautiful! The numerous buildings of the imperial Seraï were overtopped by shadowy plane-trees, leafy beeches, lofty cypresses, feathery acacias, and other magnificent forest trees; from amid whose foliage the gleaming domes and gilded spires of the palace peeped out like glimpses of fairy-land. On the extreme point of the shore stands that portion of the Seraglio which was formerly appropriated to the ladies of the Imperial Harem, but which is now untenanted, save by half a dozen old and withered women, the surviving wives of the unfortunate Sultan Selim. The sun had touched it, and was reflected back in brightness from its gilded doors and glittering lattices. It looked like a cluster of kiosks gracefully flung together in the hour of sport.