regulated by strict laws, and this is enough to
condemn the adept, who appears to have a
quantity of it. Thus, being taught by these
difficulties, I have determined to lie hid, and
will communicate the art to thee, who
dreamest of performing public good, that we
may see what you will undertake when you
obtain it."

THE ROVING ENGLISHMAN.
THE PASSAGE OF THE DANUBE.

A WILD wind was blowing, and a drifting
sleet beat in our faces as we waded through
mud and mire down to the water side. Here
were bales of goods and heaps of military
stores, crowds of dirty, ragged, desponding
Turkish soldiers, waiting, seemingly, to be
rained upon, and for no other purpose whatever.
Weary, jaded-looking oxen, rudely
yoked to the most primitive waggons,
ruminated in patient wretchedness, wet through.
There was a great multitude of people and a
great number of things, but there was no life
and bustle. Everybody and everything
appeared to be waiting for some unexplained
event, and to be wasting time, meanwhile, in
listless discomfort. The broad river teemed
with craft of all descriptions, from the rattling
Austrian steamer, tugging long rafts laden
with warlike implements, and the rakish
Greek merchantman, down to the heavy
Bulgarian barges which serve as ferry-boats, and
the most trumpery little cockleshells used for
coasting in fine weather or in bobbing about
from ship to ship.

The aspect of affairs generally was
unsatisfactory. Even our old friends, the
officers lately in the service of the king of
Candy, who much delight in the gay uniforms
allowed to Omer Pasha's staff, and who were
consequently assembled here in considerable
force, appeared to lose all their usual vivacity
and strutting importance amidst the
complete and perfect cheerlessness around them
here.

We try to get a boat, and thus pass over to
Giurgevo and the regions of civilisation at
once, but the thing is absolutely impossible.
There are plenty of boats, as we have said,
but they seem to belong to nobody, and
nobody, visible at least, appears to belong to
them. They have, indeed, the freedom of
the waterside, and keep bobbing about and
bumping against each other amidst the short
fat waves of the Danube, but nobody heeds
them, and they may creak and groan, and
bob and strain at their cables for ever,
precisely like a man with a grievance.
So, after shouting for some time, and
getting into a boat or two, just to try if our
apparent appropriation of it will arouse
any apathetic owner to assert his rights, and
then getting out of it in despair at not being
able to attract the smallest attention, we
finally clamber up a mud hill and elbow our
way through a listless crowd of soaking
bumpkins, then we toil up some rotten
wooden stairs to a ricketty platform, and so
into a Bulgarian coffee-house which is there
situated.

It is full to suffocation of military idlers of
every description, from the last dashing
courier who has posted down with despatches
from Bucharest, to the loosest hanger-on of
the Turkish army, on the look-out for a
little quiet game of robbery whenever an
occasion may turn up favourable to the
exercise of his talents in that direction.
An immense fire of damp wood and ashes
slumbers and moulders in an ample grate.
The hobs and hearthstone are garnished with
little black invalid coffee-pots, one without a
handle, another with its handle tied on by a
piece of dirty twisted linen, a third with a
great bit knocked off its rim, a fourth used
and battered out of all shape, suggesting an
idea—perhaps true enough—that it may have
been frequently applied to the hard pates of
refractory customers.

Everybody is smoking—not the long, majestic
pipes of Constantinople and Asia Minor,
nor the light fancy article covered with glass
beads and gay silk or gold and silver wire,
which are of common use in Syria and Palestine,
nor the costly implement of silver and
precious wood which solaces the idleness of
our lazy allies on the frontiers of Persia and
in Kurdistan. The Bulgarian pipe appears
to the most uninterested observer to belong
to a people addicted to the pursuits of
agriculture. It is short, fat, sturdy, unpolished:
it is made of a stick cut out of a hedge.
A large round hole is burnt or whittled
through it—this forms the stem; the bowl
is made of a piece of the root of a tree
with a receptacle for tobacco and a dumpy
exit for smoke punched irregularly into it.
It is stuck on the stick as much on one side
as the rowdy white hat of a medical student,
and looks not unlike it in the eyes
of any one gifted with a good serviceable
amount of ready imagination. The Bulgarian
pipe is dirty, as all Bulgarian things
are: it is covered over with several layers
of various coloured muds, dried by time,
and blending not inharmoniously the one
with the other. It has no mouth-piece as
other pipes have, but the smoker puts his
lips to the hole, and sucks at it ardently till
satiated. The tobacco is coarse, rough,
untractable, and bitter, but this does not seem
to diminish in any way the visible enjoyment
experienced from the use of it, as may be
witnessed by the attentive examination of
any gentleman present as he sits behind his
cloud of smoke, somnolent and surly.

It is a quaint scene. The Bulgarians dress
in a more primitive fashion than is even
usual among the Turks, whose dress is
always quaint and primitive. They do not
wear beards like the rest of their countrymen.
They shave their heads and every part of
the face except the upper lip; and, the