To be seen in all its beauty, the Bosphorus should be looked upon by moonlight. Then it is that the occupants of the spacious mansions which are mirrored in its waters, enjoy to the fullest perfection the magnificence of the scene around them. The glare of noon-day reveals too broadly the features of the locality; while the deep, blue, star-studded sky, the pure moonlight, and the holy quiet of evening, lend to it, on the contrary, a mysterious indistinctness which doubles its attraction. The inhabitants of the capital are conscious of this fact; and during the summer months, when they occupy their marine mansions, one of their greatest recreations is to seat themselves upon the seaward terraces, to watch the sparkling of the ripple, and to listen to the evening hymn of the seamen on board the Greek and Italian vessels; amused at intervals by a huge shoal of porpoises rolling past, gambolling in the moonlight, and plunging amid the waves with a sound like thunder: while afar off are the dark mountains of Asia casting their long dusky shadows far across the water, and the quivering summits of the tall trees on the edge of the channel sparkling like silver, and lending the last touch of loveliness to a landscape perhaps unparalleled in the world. Shakspeare must have had a vision of the Bosphorus, when he wrote the garden scene in Romeo and Juliet! All the Orientals idolize flowers. Every good house upon the border of the channel has a parterre, terraced off from the sea, of which you obtain glimpses through the latticed windows; and where the rose trees are trained into a thousand shapes of beauty—sometimes a line of arches rises all bloom and freshness above a favourite walk—sometimes the plants are stretched round vases of red clay of the most classical formation, of which they preserve the shape—ranges of carnations, clumps of acacias, and bosquets of seringa, are common; and the effect of these fair flowers, half shielded from observation, and overhung with forest trees, which are in profusion in every garden, is extremely agreeable. Another peculiarity of the Bosphorus is the great depth of the water to the very edges of the channel. The terraces that hem it in are frequently injured by their contact with the shipping which, in a sudden lull of wind, or by some inadvertence on the part of the helmsman, “run foul” (to use a nautical expression) of the shore; nor is it the terraces alone that suffer, for the houses whose upper stories project over the stream, which is almost universally the case where they are of any extent, are constantly sustaining injury from the same cause.