The road to Constantinople carried them through the richest meadows, which, as it was then the month of May, were clothed with exceeding beauty, and so thickly sprinkled with flowers and aromatic herbs, that the wheels of the carriages, crushing them as they drove along, literally perfumed the air. At Kutchuk Tchekmedje, where they lodged in what had formerly been a monastery of dervishes, Lady Montague requested the owner, a country schoolmaster, to show her his own apartments, and was surprised, says she, to see him point to a tall cypress-tree in the garden, on the top of which was a place for a bed for himself, and a little lower one for his wife and two children, who slept there every night. I was so much diverted with the fancy, I resolved to examine his nest nearer; but, after going up fifty steps, I found I had still fifty to go up, and then I must climb from branch to branch with some hazard of my neck; I thought it, therefore, the best way to come down again. Navigators in the South Sea have found whole nations who, like this romantic Ottomite, lived perched upon trees, like eagles, descending only when in lack of prey or recreation. The first objects which struck her on arriving at Constantinople were the cemeteries, which upon the whole seemed to occupy more ground than the city itself. These, however, with their tombs and chapels, have been so frequently described by modern travellers, that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them, curious as they are; though we may remark, in passing, that their fancy of sculpturing a rose on the monuments of unmarried women is a delicate allusion to the purity of the dead. In the month of June they were driven by the heat of the weather to the village of Belgrade, fourteen miles from Constantinople, on the shores of the Black Sea, one of the usual retreats of the European embassies. Here our fair traveller found an earthly representation of the Elysian Fields: Devenere locos lætos, et amœna vireta Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas. Largior hic campos, æther et lumine vestit Purpureo. Their house, the site of which, nothing more remaining, is still visited by European travellers, stood in the middle of a grove chiefly of fruit-trees. The walks, carpeted with short soft grass, were shady and cool; and on all sides a perpetual verdure was maintained by numerous fountains of pure, beautiful water. From the house and various other points views were obtained of the Black Sea, with its picturesque verdant shores, while the fresh breezes which blew continually from that quarter sufficiently tempered the heat of summer. The charms of such scenes inspire gayety even in the oppressed. For here the Greeks, forgetting for a moment the yoke of the Ottomite, assembled in great numbers of both sexes every evening, to laugh and sing, and “dance away their time.”