drawling train of rude carts, filled with red
leather covered chests, withered old women, and
rosy children; these were the first band of
exiles, starting for their new home in far-off
Anatolia. Beside the carts, paced the pale,
hard-featured women, in their dirty, gipsy finery,
their silver-tinselled helmets, their veils, and
their coloured scarfs. When I looked at those
women, with the hair cut straight across the
forehead, and falling down the cheeks on
either side in long wavy droops, I fancied
myself gone back, by an express train of memory,
to the reign of Tamerlane, and that I was
beholding one of those weeping emigrations
which his gigantic conquests produced.

As the long train of sick children, jaded
women, sullen men, fierce youths, and dying old
women who would never live the journey out,
passed me, I sat down on the step of a
melon-seller's door, and fell a thinking how this
cruel banishment of a brave but unhappy nation
had removed one of the great bulwarks between
the steadily advancing Russian frontier, and our
rich India. Ever since the bequest of Georgia
to Russia, the Muscovites have been trying to
tread the life out of Circassia, and push on to
Persia. Slowly the iron wall of forts closed in
upon Schamyl—the Abd-el-Kader of Daghestan
—and, at last, turned his mountain home into a
prison.

Only a week before the sad news of his
surrender reached Stamboul, an English consular
agent from Erzeroum told me that he had lately
been visited in Armenia by a confidential
messenger of the hero, who informed him that unless
England sent speedy help, he must shortly
surrender. He was so dogged by Russian troops,
that he could no longer sleep two nights running
in the same aoul, so that he grew aweary of his
life, and wished only for rest.

CHRISTMAS BOUGHS.

THE mistletoe and holly now reign in every
British household the wide world o'er, having
done so annually now for more than two
thousand years. Yet very little is known respecting
the rise and progress of their sovereignty.

Pliny, in the words of his translator, Dr.
Philemon Holland, says: " And forasmuch as
we are entered into a discourse touching
miselto, I cannot overpasse one strange thing
thereof used in France. The Druidae (for so
they call their Divinours, Wise Men, and the
state of their clergie) esteeme nothing in
the world more sacred than miselto and the
tree whereon it breedeth, so it be on the oke.
Now you must take this by the way. The
priests or clergiemen chose of purpose such
groves for their Divine service as stood onely on
okes; nay, they solemnise no sacrifice, nor
perform any sacred ceremonies, without branches
and leaves thereof; so that they may well
enugh to be named thereupon Dryidae in
Greeke, which signifieth as much as the oke
priests. Certes to say, whatsoever they find
growing upon that tree over and besides its own
fruite, be it miselto, or anything else, they
esteeme it as a gift sent from Heaven, as a sure
sign that the God whom they serve giveth them
to understand that he hath chosen that peculiar
tree. And no marveile, for in verie deed miselto
is passing geason (scarce) and hard to be found
on the oke." He further describes how the
Druids, with many devout ceremonies, cut down
the mistletoe, as Drayton, many years after,
relates in his Poly-olbion:

The fearless British priests, under the aged oak,
Taking a milk-white bull unstained with the yoke,
And with an axe of gold, from that Jove-sacred tree
The mistletoe cut down.

The connexion of the mistletoe with the most
ancient traditions of Scandinavia and other
European countries, invests the plant with an
interest derived from association. Although we
know little about the Druids or their customs,
their vast monuments, cairns, and cromlechs are
scattered over our country as remains of their
worship. The mistletoe was said to represent
the Messiah, and certainly at one time it was
called the wood of the holy cross (Lignum sanctae
crucis).

In the feudal ages the boughs of mistletoe
were gathered with much ceremony on the evening
before Christmas-day, and hung up in hall
or kitchen with loud shouts and rejoicing:

    On Christmas-eve the bells were rung;
    On Christmas-eve the mass was sung;
    That only night in all the year
    Saw the stoled priest the chalice rear;
    The damsel donn'd her kirtle sheen;
    The hall was dress'd with holly green;
    Forth to the woods did merry men go
    To gather in the mistletoe;
    Then open'd wide the baron's hall,
    To vassal, tenant, serf, and all.

From Herrick's Hesperides it appears that the
mistletoe and its companions retained their
places as ornaments in the house till Candlemas-day,
at which time the poet says:

    Down with the rosemary and bays,
    Down with the mistletoe:
    Instead of holly, now upraise
    The greener box for show.

The mistletoe is now excluded from the
boughs which deck the churches at Christmas,
either on account of its heathenish associations,
or because, being so often in rustic places
associated with Christmas merriment, it might
awaken remembrances little favourable to
thought and devotion. The playful customs
beneath the mistletoe-bough are of old antiquity
in our land, having originated when the plant
was dedicated to Friga, the Venus of the
Saxons.

The Druids considered the mistletoe of the
oak efficacious in all sorts of diseases. And in
many parts of Germany it is still supposed to
cure wounds, rather by its charming than its
healing properties; for the peasants also believe
that if the hunters carry it in their hands it will
ensure success. The herbalists in Queen
Elizabeth's time, however, enumerate various