In that city he laid his plans for the future, and abandoned his purposed trip to the Euphrates and Tigris. He relinquished the design to visit Assyria with great reluctance, and decided to pass through the interior of Asia Minor to Constantinople. Acting immediately upon this resolution, without an apparent doubt of being able to traverse safely the unknown interior of Asia Minor, he engaged a vessel and sailed up the coast to the Orontes River, and thence to Aleppo. In that city, by a ludicrous mistake, Mr. Taylor and his travelling companion were invited to the house of one of the wealthiest merchants, and were treated with the greatest hospitality by the owner, who supposed they were titled Englishmen. But when the mistake was revealed, Mr. Taylor had become such an agreeable visitor that his host insisted upon entertaining them during their stay in Aleppo. He had been there but a few days before he became such a general favorite, that he was invited to call on the nobility, was urged to attend feasts, balls, and weddings, and when he left the city, the friendly regrets of hundreds of Moslems and Christians followed him. Leaving Aleppo early in June, he followed the shore of the Mediterranean around to the plain of Issus, where Alexander the Great won his great victory, and thence to Tarsus, the birthplace of the Apostle Paul. It may have been “no mean city” when Paul was born, but it was a most insignificant village when Mr. Taylor was there. But as the magnificent mountains of the Taurus range loomed up along the northern horizon, his attention was taken from rags, beggary, and ruined fortresses, to snowy cliffs, over which he had a passion for clambering. Those persons who have ascended the Alps at the Simplon pass, have a very good idea of the Taurus mountains, and can realize somewhat of Mr. Taylor’s satisfaction as he rode up the gorges and peered into the deep valleys. He loved the mountains anywhere. But the Taurus seemed then, in the glow of his return to perfect health and with all the profusion of nature’s living beauties blooming about him, and the eternal snows gleaming above him, to be the most attractive landscape in the world. “O deep, exulting freedom of the hills! O summits vast, that to the climbing view, In naked glory stand against the blue! O cold and buoyant air, whose crystal fills Heaven’s amethystine bowl! O speeding streams, That foam and thunder from the cliffs below! O slippery brinks and solitudes of snow, And granite bleakness, where the vulture screams!”