This was the overture to a terpsichorean and dramatic entertainment most unique and amusing. The programme opened with a dance of Zebeques, the barbarous race who occupy the country behind Smyrna. They are wrapped in a sash from the armpits to the hips, with a sort of baggy knee-breeches, and bearing long knives thrust crosswise through their sashes. They formed a circle, and began a movement which seemed like a dance of men in armor, half stage-stride and half hop. The music struck up an appropriate air, and the dancers, joining in the song, circled slowly two or three times in the same staid and deliberate manner, then, drawing their knives, brandished them in time, quickening their pace, and hurrying around quicker and quicker as the song grew more excited, when they finally came to a climax of fury, rushing in on each other at the centre of the circle as if to cut each other down. But the raised knives were arrested by the opposing empty hands; and, the paroxysm passed, the song died down to its lower tone and moderate time, and the dance began a new movement, each dancer thrusting his knife into the ground at the centre, and then repeated the quickening circles; this time, rushing, at the climax, on their knives and drawing them from the earth, they threw themselves on an imaginary enemy outside the circle, and, having hypothetically demolished him, returned to their gyrations, varying the finale by lifting one of the company into the air on their hands, and dropping him simultaneously with their voices. This lasted half an hour. After an intermission, in which the soldiers, unawed by the presence of the Pasha, laughed and joked and shouted to their content, a soldier entered the circle dressed as an Egyptian dancing woman. He was one of the tallest men in the regiment, capitally travestied, and all who have seen the dance of the Almah can imagine the bursts of laughter with which his grave, precise imitation of one of them was received by the circle. I have never seen anything more exquisitely ludicrous. His figure seemed lithe as a willow-wand, and he twisted and bent, and bowed and doubled, with the peculiar expression of physique which seemed impossible to any other than the slender Egyptian girl.