During our halt, a party of Bohemian gipsies, on their way to the coast, stopped to refresh themselves and their donkeys at the mountain spring; they were about thirty in number, and the men were remarkably tall and well-looking, but formidable enough, with their pistols and yataghans peeping from their girdles; they had two or three sickly, weary children in their train, who appeared half dead with heat and toil; and half a dozen withered old women, who might have sat for the originals of Macbeth’s witches, they were so “grim and grisly;” but there was one female among them, a dark-eyed, rosy-lipped maiden of sixteen, or thereabouts, who was the perfection of loveliness. For a while she stood apart, but, as the rest of the tribe, attracted by my riding-dress, clustered about me, and assailed me by questions to which I was utterly unable to reply, she at length took courage and joined the party. As her wild and timid glance wandered from me to her companions, I found that it invariably rested upon one individual, and I had little difficulty in filling up the romance suggested by her earnest looks. Nor was I deceived; for when the tribe moved away, the bridle of her donkey was held by the tall, sunburnt youth to whom she had attracted my attention; and as they passed the stream, he did not relinquish it though he trod knee-deep in water, when he might have traversed the little bridge without wetting the soles of his feet; but in recompense of his devotion, he feasted, as he went, on the smiles of his fair mistress, and the cherries which I had poured into her lap. After their departure, I made a hasty sketch of the fountain, and then quitted with reluctance a spot so redolent of beauty. The plain at this point appeared to be set in one uninterrupted frame-work of mountains—the river ran shimmering and sparkling through its centre—the mulberry and walnut trees were scattered thickly over its entire surface—the clouds, as they flitted by, created a thousand beautiful varieties of light and shade; and the soft wind that sighed through the maple leaves almost made me forget my fatigue. What rills of water we passed through after we left the plain! Every quarter of a mile we encountered a fountain; and for upwards of a league we rode through the heart of a mulberry plantation, fringed with noble walnut trees. At some of the fountains, groups of women were washing; and it was amusing to see them hastily huddling on their yashmacs as they remarked the approach of our party. In many cases, the water which escaped from the basins provided for it, ran rippling along the road, and covering the whole surface for a considerable distance, ere it buried itself among the long grass that skirted the plantation. The mulberry wood was succeeded by gardens; and the rich, rank vegetation reminded me strongly of Portugal, than which I never saw any country more similar.