I shall say nothing of the forest-like cemetery; I have spoken of it elsewhere. The dark cypresses were flinging their long shadows across the road; and the hill which we slowly ascended on quitting the manufactory was called “The Rise of the Vines.” The name is appropriate; for the houses that fringe it on the left hand overlook a wide extent of orchard and vineyard, interspersed with kiosks, and groups of flowering acacias. The view was bounded by the sea, and the tall mountains above Broussa: and flowers were blossoming by the wayside, and wild-birds were singing among the boughs. No wonder that the nature-loving Turks are attached to Scutari. A small building to the left of the road attracted my attention, and I alighted to examine it. It proved to be the tomb of a Saint; and I distinguished, through the closely-latticed casement, a wooden sarcophagus surmounted by a green turban, and surrounded by the prayer-carpets of the priests. The wire-work of the window was knotted all over with rags; shreds of cotton, woollen, and silk—morsels of ribbon and tape—and fragments of every description. They had been fastened there by sick and suffering persons, who had firmly believed that their trouble, whether mental or physical, would remain attached to the rag, and that they should themselves “return each to his home clean.” We avoided the town, for the Plague was there; that omnipresent but invisible enemy which stretches its clammy hand over the East, and sweeps down its prey, unchecked by the groans of the bereaved, or the pangs of the smitten—the deadly Plague, which spares neither sex, nor age, nor condition, but makes one universal harvest of mankind. Nothing ever thrilled me more than when I once came suddenly, during my wanderings, upon an encampment of the Plague-smitten. The huts are generally erected on a hill-side, and the tents pitched among them; and you see the families of the infected basking in the sunshine within their prescribed limits, and gazing eagerly at the chance passenger, whom his ignorance of their vicinity may conduct past their temporary dwellings; the children rolling half-naked upon the grass; and the sallow and careworn parents hanging out the garments of the patients on the trees of the neighbourhood. Such was precisely the case with that into which I had unconsciously intruded; and whence I was very hastily dislodged by the shouts of the guard, stationed to enforce the quarantaine of the mountain colony; and the alarmed exclamations of my companions. It is difficult to look upon such a scene, and upon such a sky, and to believe in the existence of this frightful scourge! It is the canker at the core of the forest-tree—the serpent in the garden of Eden.