the report that the engine was broken, and mended with cordage. The interior arrangements of the ship were on a par with her seagoing qualifications. The dinners, in point of grease and filth, were perfect of their kind; the wine to match; the ship's officers, who dined with us, specimens of dirt which we thought unrivalled till we saw the steward, who in his turn faded before the steward's boy; and to crown all, a bill of fare was hung in a conspicuous position, detailing all sorts of fabulous delicacies, and concluding with an appeal to all who laid claim to civilisation to exhibit proper deference to their fellow-passengers of the fair sex.

Varna must be relapsing so fast into its original obscurity, that if I waited a few years longer it is possible that any remarks I might have to make upon it might possess all the charm of novelty. As, however, I can scarcely flatter myself that this is yet the case, I shall not expatiate upon the subject. Neither shall I hold forth upon those two inevitable travellers muffled up in sheepskins and attended by cavass and surudji, who form the invariable introduction to every record of Turkish travel, and at whose reappearance the stoutest reader might feel faint-hearted, but shall merely state that on the 9th December 1853, myself and one other Englishman left Varna en route for Schoumla; the whole party, attendants and baggage included, mounted on the tough little ponies which in Turkey do duty as post-horses.

The day was cold; mists were hanging on the distant hill-tops, and small misty flakes of snow began to fall as we rode out of Varna. As long as our road held to the bank of the celebrated fresh-water lake which, abutting on the sea close to Varna, winds away far inland between two ranges of hill, so long the scene, although wild and wintry, was not without beauty. The neighbouring hills, covered with a tall and dense growth of brown and leafless brushwood, mingled with trees with the dead leaves still hanging, stood forward

in bold and picturesque headlands crowned with rugged grey crags, the lake, narrowed to the dimensions of a small river, winding its way between. But by-and-by the country changed in character. Level plains, intersected by a few small watercourses, and bounded by belts of low rocky hill; thin thorny brushwood or stubbly withered grass peeping up above the sheet of snow, which grew deeper as we advanced ;-these, animated occasionally by a covey of partridges trotting along in the snow with their feathers huddled up, a herd of ponies, or a portly Turk swelled out with furred garments and pistols, jogging along on a little pony, formed the view which, with little variation, lasted as far as Schoumla.

The procrastination inherent in everything Turkish expanded what ought to have been a two into a three days' journey. The intermediate nights were spent in Bulgarian villages, one of the best of which it may be well to describe. It consisted of small roughly-built stone houses with great projecting brown thatches, each one, together with its outbuildings, surrounded by a dry thorn - fence. As we rode into it, the last faint light of a winter evening just served to show the snow lying under foot or gleaming on the ridges of the surrounding hills, and to afford us a most unpromising prospect. No one was abroad; no door opened; no light gleamed; a huge pack of curs assailed us with loud barkings, but their clamour extracted no response from any human voice; and as we sat on our horses, cold, impatient, and disconsolate, anxiously watching our cavass,* who was rummaging and hunting amongst the dusky inhospitable enclosures, it seemed as if the whole population was shamming dead, and we felt that we might sit out in the snow all night with the gratified consent of everybody. At length a functionary, whose various duties comprise that of quartering travellers upon the often unwilling inhabitants, was routed out, and by him we were introduced to the interior of a Bulgarian farm.

We had fallen on a favourable specimen, exhibiting a degree of comfort which we did not find as we penetrated more deeply inland. The room into which we were admitted, probably the best in the house, was low and white-washed, with a few rude shelves, a mud floor, and rough ceiling, which barely gave room to stand upright between its supporting beams. At one end was a large fireplace with a great projecting chimney. The whole seemed clean; and to the credit of the establishment (or more likely to the credit of the cold weather), I must state that I only found one flea all night; a perfect phenomenon of cleanliness for Turkey. The owners of the house were an old "Boolghar" or Bulgarian, his wife, and some grown sons; the woman tolerably clean in appearance, but the men foul enough to look at in their sheepskin caps and dingy garments, and, like all Bulgarians, suggesting strongly the idea that they swathed themselves in their clothes as you might wrap a mummy in its cerements, and kept them on till they dropped off with time. They were all civil and willing enough; spread mats and rugs for us in one corner of the room, piled up the saddles and baggage in another; prepared a dinner, of which the only intolerable part was the wine (which much resembled a mixture of bad wine and sour beer); and supplied us with some valuable information on the internal economy of the Turkish empire, which in due course of time was communicated to the British public as follows.

My companion was "Own Correspondent" to- -let me throw the veil of mystery over the valuable organ of public opinion which he represented, by calling it the Morning Twaddle. Like myself, he had been only a few days in the country, and knew about as many words of the language as he had been days in the land. Zealous, however, in the discharge of his duty, he established himself on a bit of carpet in the chimney-corner, and there squatting after the manner of the country, proceeded to distract the old woman of the house, who was cooking our dinner, with questions on polity of state somewhat in this

fashion:-"I say, old lady! do the Turks-Osmanli, you know-do they bully you much? Chok Kamchouk

plenty of whip? This sort of thing -ch-k, ch-k, swish, swish--" imitating with voice and gesture the process of what Carlyle calls "shamefully fustigating." Old lady, profoundly ignorant of his meaning, waggles her head with a soothing and pacifying air, acquiescent in anything he may please to remark; and in as short a space of time as may serve to carry a letter from Bulgaria to the Strand, the readers of the Morning Twaddle are told that "the instances of oppression which have been related to me by females of respectability, as endured at the hands of their brutal masters the Turks, are almost beyond credence."

I give this passage, strong in the faith that my respected companion of that night is now in California, and can't haul me over the coals for the trifling inaccuracy of a word or two.

On the third day of our journey, looking across a snow-covered sweep of plain, we perceived a checkered mass of white and brown patches nestling into a horse-shoe recess which shelved up into an abrupt hill-range rising directly in front of

us.

These were the snow-covered roofs and the brown walls of the town of Schoumla.

Passing by a loopholed gate through the irregularly-traced and weak intrenchments, we found ourselves amongst wretched little "wattle-anddab" houses, interspersed with gigantic dung-heaps tenanted by troops of snarling dogs. These were the suburbs. The central portions of the town, as we penetrated into them, were not much more cheerful. Small shabby houses of wattle-and-dab or mud-cemented stone, with dilapidated tiled roofs projecting in great eaves, turned their backs upon us (for Mussulman jealousy forbids their showing a front to the public gaze) from each side of the street, in rows sometimes continuous and sometimes broken by the intervention of courtyards and enclosures. In the commercial streets a roughly-built veran

dah or rude colonnade covered the footway; beneath this appeared little box-like shops, open to the raw wintry day without intervention of door or window. Carts drawn by oxen or big lumbering buffaloes, and driven by Bulgarian peasants, were crushing the snow in the roadway; while Turkish soldiers in their long coats of white sackcloth, dark Egyptian auxiliaries looking desperately cold, and miscellaneous civilians in the old Turkish dress, crowded round the shops bargaining for dried fish and groceries, or trampled the footway in front into a slush of snow and filth. Occasionally, from the higher streets that wind up the steep slope on which the town stands, a bird's-eye view was gained of an expanse of flat roofs loaded with snow, above which rose small white minarets surmounted each one by what looked like an extinguisher plated with white metal. All was dreary and disconsolate, and promising little of rest, warmth, or comfort.

It could not promise much less than it performed. From a small marketplace, crowded with bullockcarts, soldiers, cavasses with long pistols at their belts, and jackasses bearing huge loads of firewood, we turned off through a small portecochère into a passage leading steeply down-hill into some lower region. Arrived at the bottom of this, we found ourselves in a small courtyard, surrounded by stabling, with, on one side, a small shabby coffeehouse full of soldiers, and on the other, just over the porte-cochère by which we had entered, a most remarkable cock-loft, with a shaky balcony in front, and a very cranky wooden staircase leading to it. Some soldiers in the yard were in the act of loading baggage-horses with bags of silver, and the charger of the officer commanding the escort-a rough pony with a big schabraque and an old baggy cotton umbrella hung to the saddle-bow-stood waiting for his rider. The cock-loft above mentioned was to be our abode in compliance with a request for lodgings which we had sent in advance by our cavass, it had been told off to our service by the civil governor of the place; and as it will

give an idea of the accommodation to be expected at Turkish inns, I will describe it more particularly.

It was the smallest den that two men could well be packed into. On one side was a broken window, boarded up; on the other, two little windows, still possessed of panes of glass, but in such a rattle-trap state that we did not dare to open them for fear of their dropping to pieces. The floor, composed of small sticks, was full of holes, and gave to the tread so alarmingly that we did not feel at all sure that an incautious step might not send us clean through it, and land us, with all our trunks and baggage, on the heads of the Faithful loitering in the gateway beneath. A raised place like a counter crossed one end of the room. This, according to Turkish ideas, was the bed, and constituted not only the whole of the sleeping accommodation, but the whole of the furniture of any kind whatever. No fireplace existed. For a time we kept up a miserable warmth by means of a mangal or charcoal brazier, which gave us the headache; and then as night came on and the charcoal went out, we wrapped ourselves in our coats and cloaks, and, taking possession of the counter, gave ourselves up to be frozen by the cold wind that came in at every chink. A Turk could have endured such an abode. Wrapped in a mass of lousy furs, and with a pipe in his mouth, he would have squatted himself cross-legged in the least windy corner, and being gifted by nature with a perfect indifference to vermir, a strong disinclination to move when he can by any possibility sit still, and a head that defies the fumes of charcoal, he would have lived in patience, if not in content. But to us less highly-gifted beings this was impossible; and somewhere about the expiration of four-and-twenty hours, having failed in all our efforts to find another lodging, we became disconsolate indeed. It appeared-or, at all events, the civil governor chose to give out so-that no lodgings could be assigned without the express order of Omar Pasha, then holding his headquarters in the town. How to get this order

was the difficulty. My companion, with his hair dishevelled and a despairing look, sat on a trunk in a corner, as though life's battle and all its correspondence were over, and nothing remained but to die patiently. But I will not describe the grande et déterminée resolution" by which I pulled out my uniform, and went off to the Pasha in it, further than to state, that unpacking and getting into a brannew, never-before-worn uniform, in that nasty, dusty, fusty, buggy old cock-loft, with the wintry wind blowing my shirt-tails to the four quarters of heaven, was the nastiest thing in the way of toilette I ever performed.

We stayed in Schoumla but a few days. His Highness Omar Pasha wanted, I suspect, to get rid of us, and slightly humbugged us however this may be, he told us that an attack was daily expected on Kalafat, a village lying on the north bank of the Danube, opposite to Widdin, and which the Turks were then holding against a blockading force of Russians. Upon which we, anxious to "trail a pike" in the great fight, hired post-horses, strapped a minute portion of baggage on to their cruppers, and in company with two new friends whom we had met at Schoumla, hustled off into the wilds of Bulgaria, with an insane idea that we were going to gallop straight up to Widdin in a flash of fire. Insane I call it, for no weaker term can be assigned to a delusion favouring the belief that love or money will hasten men or matters in Turkey.

It would be tedious to give a detailed account of the journey. We pushed straight up the hill-range that lies behind Schoumla, through the tall brushwood jungle that covers its crest, and down again by a narrow and boggy path (where all our saddle-bags took the opportunity of turning one after the other, carrying, of course, the saddles with them) down the far side, looking, as we descended, over an expanse of hilly country, checkered with brushwood

and dotted with trees, with valleys and bottoms swampy from a recent thaw, and with a distant hill-range just showing its dark ridge above a massy line of dense white cloud, and catching the sun-rays which poured in clearly-defined shafts from behind a rift in the grey sky: then over the lower country, till night closed in with such darkness, that, except where a rising ridge presented its fringe of trees and brushwood in relief against the lighter sky, the face of the country seemed a black chaos; and still we followed our surudji, who, splashing through water, squashing through mud, smashing through thorn-fences, but always by some curious instinct holding to the little apology for a road, pushed on through the dark at a jog-trot. Then, next day, in the grey light of a winter's dawn, we rode through the gorge behind Eski Juma, where the high broken cliffs and grey rocks hem in the narrow pass and the rushing stream that accompanies it; and then again through large forests, crunching the snow that lay under brown wintry oaks, which might have been beautiful if they had not, by some mania of the Turks, been stunted into ugly pollards; now passing a forest village of a few comfortless huts, now diving into a ravine, and mounting its opposite ascent, from whence we saw line over line of distant hillranges, with snow-covered peaks still higher, rising in the extreme distance; or gazed down into a deep valley, where the mist lay in long white lines, as though two hostile armies were cannonading. Sometimes we ate and slept in a dirty little Bulgarian hut, with, oh! such evilsmelling Bulgarian hosts; sometimes in an equally dirty post-house, where we got filth to eat, and a charcoal brazier to poison instead of warming us, and ended with a struggle, more or less noisy and quarrelsome, to get fresh horses betimes and be gone, in which we usually got completely defeated by the mingled insolence and imperturbability of the Turks.

What with snow, sleet, cold fingers and toes, long stages quite beyond the strength of the ponies, and fleas