The arms, as I have already remarked to be universal with the Turkish troops, were in the most admirable order, and the stores containing clothing were well filled, and very neatly arranged. We declined visiting the Hospital, as three recent cases of Plague had occurred there; added to which we discovered certain threatenings in the sky which denoted a coming storm; and, as the passage from Scutari to Topphannè is, though comparatively short, extremely dangerous in the event of a sudden tempest, we spent half an hour with the Commandant in his apartment, where we partook of some exquisite sherbet, made from the juice of the green lemon; and hurried thence to the pier, laden with a basket of the delicious grapes and melons of Asia. But we had already lingered too long: the wind was blowing briskly from the Black Sea; and the distant shores were veiled in dense and heavy vapour. We had just reached the Maiden’s Tower when the gust caught us. Of all the environs of the Bosphorus this is the most dangerous, for the current runs madly out into the Sea of Marmora; and the wind, released from the Asian mountains which hem it in to the point of Scutari, is suddenly set free in all its violence. Hence it arises that, in the immediate neighbourhood of the Maiden’s Tower, more caïques are wrecked during the year than in the whole of the channel; and there we were, every wave dashing angrily against the side of the frail boat, and pouring over us its foaming waters; the wind driving us down the current, and the Turkish boatmen scarcely able to ejaculate their “Mashallàhs!” and “Inshallàhs!” from the terror which made their teeth chatter in their heads. It was a frightful moment. At one instant we made way; at the next we were carried back by the force of the current; we could not guess how the affair would terminate; but meanwhile the venerable old caïquejhe who pulled the after-oars, amid all his alarm sought to comfort me: “Tell her,” he said perpetually to the dragoman, “tell her that there is no danger; she is a woman, and the fear may kill her. My heart is sick and I can scarcely pull, for my hand trembles, and my breath fails; but console her—tell her that we shall soon be across the channel—that I will put her ashore somewhere—anywhere—tell her what you will, for she is a woman, and I pity her.”