Meanwhile, the ladies in the gallery were not idle: compliments were exchanged—inquiries made and answered—and conversations carried on, as coolly as though the interlocutors had been quietly seated in their own houses: while every five or six minutes a priest made his appearance, bearing a salver to receive the donations of the pious and charitable. But I soon wearied of the nasal, monotonous chant of the officiating priests, which more than counteracted the light and gladsome aspect of the edifice; and, satisfied with having seen a great deal of paint and gilding, and a rich display of tissue and embroidery, as well as a holy scuffle among the crowd at a particular period of the service, to possess themselves of the candles that had lit up the Sepulchre, I escaped from the scene of pious confusion; and slowly taking my way through the cypress-shaded burial-ground, and onward to the Echelle des morts, I gladly stepped into the caïque, to share, beneath the hospitable roof of a friend, in the magnificent ceremonials which were to take place in the ancient patriarchal church at the Fanar. As we traversed the port, I was struck by the various character of the shipping, more than usually conspicuous under a flood of bright sunshine. The vessels of war, (one of them the largest in the world) were lying like floating cities on the still surface of the mirror-like Bosphorus: the foreign merchant ships, anchored in dense ranks along the shore, with their sails furled, and their slender masts shooting upwards, like the tall stems of a wind-stripped forest—the Arab vessels, with their sharp high prows and sterns, precisely as I had often seen them represented on the antique medals—the steam-packets, dark and motionless like ocean-monsters, about to vomit forth their volumes of thick, suffocating smoke upon the clear air; while about, and around, and among all these, darted, and glided, and whirled, the slender caïques of polished and carved walnut wood, with their gracefully-clad rowers, and their minute gilded ornaments glittering in the light; the sharp shrill cry of “On the European side”—“On the Asiatic side!”—ringing upon the ear every moment, as the boatmen indicated each to the other which course to steer, in order to leave to all a free passage. We landed on a terrace overhanging the water, at the extremity of our friend’s garden; and after taking coffee with the ladies, immediately set forth to visit the church by daylight. Though more limited in its dimensions, and less rich in its decorations, than the church at Pera, it nevertheless pleased me infinitely better; there was an air of time-hallowed holiness about the whole of its interior, far more attractive than the unfaded paint and fresh gilding which I had seen in the morning.