horseback, without any particular instruction.
In the French riding-school there is taught
only the balance seat and clumsiness. There
is scarcely a Turk who has not, from his
earliest years, been accustomed to perform
upon a fiery steed very long journeys to one
of the bazaars that are established every
year in the different provinces for
interchange and sale of national commodities.
Extensive plains and desert sands, broken
and rugged paths up and down steep
mountains, currents or broad river-beds,
never divert the Turkish rider from his
path.

The Turks' cavalry horses are of medium
size, active and spirited; they are provided
by the Government from their stables of
Enos and Roumelia, where they have joined
the races of Mecklenburgh with that of the
Arabian horses of Baghdad.

One peculiarity of the Turkish soldiery
ought to be named. They will smoke. It is
a very common thing to see a sentinel with
a cigar in his mouth; and it is not unusual
in passing a corps de garde to be respectfully
asked, "Have you any tobacco, sir?"
Nothing is commoner when one happens to be
smoking than to be checked by the military,
in a voice pitched between entreaty and
command, "Wait, sir! A light, sir, if you
please!" This is by no means done in
discourtesy, but, because, in spite of all the
Bashaws and all their tails, the Turks have
a simple democratic way with them which
often takes the stately Briton by surprise.

MISS FURBEY.

I MUST have been a very little girl—not
quite fourteen years old, I think, when Miss
Furbey offered to take me off my guardians'
hands, and instruct me (as a useful branch of
education) in her business of a milliner and
dressmaker. Miss Furbey kept a little shop
beside Bow church, near Stratford (she has
been dead so many years, and everything is
so changed since then, that there can be no
harm in mentioning it). Her house was an
old, tumble-down tenement of lath and
plaster, stuck all over with little indentations,
like the marks of giant finger-nails—so old,
indeed, that timid gazers through its cloudy
lattice windows might once have beheld the
company of Puritan soldiers who ransacked
the old church opposite, and made a
sacrilegious bonfire among its graves. You went
down two steps to get into the shop (not
forgetting to stoop upon the threshold;) and if
the sun had been shining in the street, you
seemed for a minute or two to have plunged
into total darkness, and had to shut your eyes
and open them again before you could see the
dusty rounds of white chip that hung upon
the walls, or the enormous black-silk, coal-
scuttle bonnet, which she kept there as a relic
of her own apprenticeship days. It was not
a cheerful place for a child to begin the world
in. It smelt mouldy, and woody; and if by
rare chance a sunbeam crept in there, it
seemed more full of busy motes than it ever
was elsewhere. On wintry evenings, the one
wretched, flat, double-wicked candle in the
window (gas had not reached those parts
then), made the place so dismal, that I would
as soon have sat in one of the church vaults
opposite. I used to be sent into the shop to
snuff it every now and then: but I could
never attend to it enough. Before I could get
back to my seat in the back parlour, and set
a dozen or two of stitches, it had a long
crusted wick again, or there was a thief in it,
or it was guttering, and dropping its tallow
upon the white sheets of paper that lined the
window show-board. That candle alone was
enough to make me wish myself at home
again.

My fellow apprentice was a big, slovenly
girl of the name of Tunnicliff. Miss Furbey
had told me, going home with her outside the
Romford coach, that Tunnicliff was a good
girl enough, but so giddy at times that she
did not know what to do with her. But
Tunnicliff, when we were going to bed that
night, said such things about Miss Furbey,
that I cried half the night to think into what
hands I had fallen. She said that she was "a
spiteful old maid, a tyrant, a Paul Pry, a
screw; ay, and a thief too. Yes; a thief." In
consequence of which, I went about in great
fear of Miss Furbey for some time, hourly
expecting her to throw off her disguise, and
become a Brownrigg. But she continued so
long in the same mood, and treated me with
such gentleness and consideration, that my
fear gradually wore away. She kept no
servant, but she never put us to any menial
work. Tunnicliff said, "A good reason why:
she knew well that she (Tunnicliff) wouldn't
do it." An hour or two before we were
up, on summer mornings, I have heard her
moving about the house; and when we came
down, everything was in order. Only once,
for many weeks, did I catch her in a white
nightcap, with broad frills, polishing the fire-
irons with a pair of leather gloves on. She
told me dress-making was too sedentary for
her, and that if she did not do other work
she would be ill. But this was an excuse for
not keeping a servant, and I quite believed
she was a screw. Tunnicliff said I was
beginning to find her out; but I soon found
out that Tunnicliff had herself no objection to
keeping a servant, so long as it cost her
nothing. Before breakfast she would ask me
to go half-a-mile or more down a back lane
into the marshes, to buy her a couple of new-
laid eggs, at a cowkeeper's there, with a
particular caution to feel them first, and ascertain
that they were warm. These she would cook
herself, and spread them over her toast, and
coolly eat the whole in the presence of
myself and Miss Furbey. Her excuse was that
she never had any appetite of a morning, and
that without some such little relish, she