Instead of a week or fortnight passed in loitering about these mysterious, narrow streets, each one of which is a picture, poking into crypts, and groping along the aisles of those dim churches, and then issuing forth into the blaze of sunshine to see the blue sea heaving in mighty masses on the rocky shore, we came here to see some vulgar spectacle of a circus or a tournament. By ill-luck, too, even this pleasure has proved abortive; a very mortifying, I might say humiliating, discovery awaited us, and we have, for shame's sake, taken our refuge in flight from one of the most interesting cities in the whole peninsula. I am ashamed to confess to you how ill I have borne the disappointment. The passing glimpses I caught here and there of steep old alleys, barely wide enough for three to go abreast; the little squares, containing some quaint monument or some fantastic fountain; the massive iron gateways, showing through the bars the groves of orange-trees within; the wide portals, opening on great stairs of snow-white marble,--all set me a-dreaming of that proud Genoa, with its merchant-princes, who combined all the haughty characteristics of a feudal state with the dashing spirit of a life of enterprise. The population, too, seemed as varied in type as the buildings around them. The bronzed, deep-browed Ligurian--the "Faquino"--by right of birth, stood side by side with the scarcely less athletic Dalmatian. The Arab from Tiflis, the Suliote, the Armenian, the dull-eyed Moslem, and the treacherous-looking Moor were all grouped about the Mole, with a host of those less picturesque figures that represent Northern Europe. There, was heard every language and every dialect. There, too, seen the lineaments of every nation, and the traits of every passion that distinguish a people. Just as on the deep blue water that broke beside them were ships of every build, from the proud three-decker to the swift "lateen," and from the tall, taper spare of the graceful clipper to the heavily rounded, low-masted galliot of the Netherlands. I own to you that however the actual life of commerce may include commonplace events and commonplace people, there is something about the sea and those that live on the great waters that always has struck me as eminently poetical. The scene, the adventurous existence, the strange faraway lands they have visited, the Spice Islands of the South, the cold shores of the Arctic Seas, the wondrous people with whom they have mingled, the dangers they have confronted,--all invest the sailor with a deep interest to me, and I regard him ever as one who has himself been an actor in the great drama of which I have only read the outline.