of six thousand Christian galley-slaves were
found chained to the oar, and released by
the victors. The old Sallee Rovers were
navigated by renegades; and even as late as
the Battle of Navarino there were Rayah
boatswains, helmsmen, gunners, on board
the Turkish men-of-war, compelled to fight
against their friends and co-religionists under
the threats of immediate death from their Moslem
masters. I must not lose this opportunity
of relating an anecdote once told by a Greek
gentleman, illustrative of the attainments of
the Turks in seamanship five and twenty
years ago:—

At the conclusion of the Greek insurrection
in eighteen hundred and twenty-nine, the
Turks turned every Greek out of their naval
service. Henceforth they were determined to
fight, work, and navigate their ships themselves.
The first they could do indifferently
well, the second and third not at all. The
seamen draughted onboard ship by the marine
conscription did not know the use or even the
name of one single spar, block, or rope;
and the officers were utterly ignorant
of the terms of the nautical vocabulary
whereby to convey their orders to their men.
Moreover, the men could not have understood
them if they had been as learned in
nautical slang as an English boatswain or a
Dutch skipper. In this dilemma, the Turkish
naval instructors hit upon an ingenious plan.
They symbolised and named the various parts
of the vessel by anything that came nearest
to hand. They tied a pear, for instance, to
the mainmast, a pomegranate to the mizenmast,
a bunch of grapes to the foremast.
The poop was distinguished by a string of
onions, the forecastle by a basket of figs, the
ropes by vine leaves or boughs of trees: the
different sails by pipe-sticks, mutton-bones,
rice-bags, or any other convenient odds and
ends.

Here was a new nautical dictionary
invented at once: "Haul down the pipe-
stick!"  "Take two reefs in the rice-bags!"
"Stand by the grapemast!"  "Go forward
to the onion-castle!" were as good words of
command when the sailors understood them
(which they soon learnt to do) as the correct
ones; and men who on their arrival on
shipboard scarcely knew a clew-line from a
kedge-anchor, or stem from stern, speedily
acquired a competent knowledge of at least
the different parts of the ship.

MINE HOST.

ONCE with a landlord wondrous fine
    A weary guest I tarried;
A golden pippin was his sign
    Upon a green branch carried.

He was a goodly Apple-tree
    With whom I took my leisure;
Fine fruit, and mellowed juicily,
    He gave me of his treasure.

There came to that same hostel green
    Full many a guest light-winging;
A merry feast they made, I ween,
    And leapt, and sang their singing.

My rest to take, my couch I made
   On mattress of green clover;
The landlord with his own broad shade
   Carefully spread me over.

I rose:—I called to pay the score,
    But, no! he grandly boweth:
Now, root and fruit, for evermore,
    God bless him while he groweth!

FLYING COACHES.

MONDAY the third of May, sixteen hundred
and sixty-nine, was a stirring morning in
Oxford. As the early light dawned, gown
and town were pressing with eager steps and
eager looks, into High Street; even the college
authorities were awakened from their morning
slumbers. "What was the cause? Oxford,
within the memory of middle-aged men, had
witnessed more than one stirring scene.
Along this same High Street, in sixteen
hundred and forty-two, Charles the First
rode from the fight at Edgehill with his
two young sons, and his nephews, Maurice
and fiery Rupert, and banners that had been
borne away,—but not in triumph,—and his
red coats following. All the bells rung out
their loudest peals, and hooded dignitaries
knelt humbly before his Majesty, offering not
only their lives and fortunes, as the modern
phrase goes, but their cherished store of college
plate—soon afterwards unceremoniously
taken, and melted down, with scarcely a word
of thanks from the Lord's anointed. Then,
that fatal Midsummer day, sixteen hundred
and forty-six, when the garrison of Oxford
marched out, and, welcomed by no glad cheers
nor sweet chimes, the gallant Parliament
troopers, heralded by the peremptory blasts
of the trumpet, as they passed along on their
noble grey chargers,—"hell broke loose," as
Antony à Wood amiably remarks,—pioneers
of freedom, as our readers will rather call
them.

But it was neither the triumph nor downfall
of Church and King, that now summoned the
early multitude into High Street: it was,—
carefully noted down in Antony's diary,
as the most important event of the half year,
''the first day that the flying coach went
from Oxford to London in one day!"
Stage coaches,—lumbering, wearying
waggon-like vehicles—had long been in vogue;
and in one of these Antony à Wood himself
had paid his first visit to London two years
before, jogging along the road at the rate
of two or three miles an hour; the wearied
travellers lodging at night at Beaconsfield,
and performing the journey in two days.
It was no wonder that all Oxford was in
a fever of excitement; a journey of two
days crowded, and cantered, and galloped