heart's life to serve you, is far away, tossing,
this stormy night, on the awful sea. Who else
is left to you? No father, no brother—no living
creature but the helpless, useless woman
who writes these sad lines, and watches by you
for the morning, in sorrow that she cannot
compose, in doubt that she cannot conquer. Oh,
what a trust is to be placed in that man's hands
to-morrow! If ever he forgets it; if ever he
injures a hair of her head!——

THE TWENTY-THIRD OF DECEMBER. Seven
o'clock. A wild unsettled morning. She has
just risen—better and calmer, now that the
time has come, than she was yesterday.

Ten o'clock. She is dressed. We have kissed
each other; we have promised each other not to
lose courage. I am away for a moment in my
own room. In the whirl and confusion of my
thoughts, I can detect that strange fancy of
some hindrance happening to stop the marriage,
still hanging about my mind. Is it hanging
about his mind, too? I see him from the
window, moving hither and thither uneasily among
the carriages at the door.—How can I write
such folly! The marriage is a certainty. In
less than half an hour we start for the church.

Eleven o'clock. It is all over. They are
married.

Three o'clock. They are gone! I am blind
with crying—I can write no more——

EASTERN LUNACY, AND SOMETHING
MORE.

THE Greek madhouse of Constantinople lies
out far beyond the Seven Towers, and outside
the walls. I went to it alone, with a letter of
introduction to a Dr. Morano, a native of Salonica.
I could get no information at first where the Greek
madhouse lay, nor, indeed, did I even know that
it was a Greek establishment that I was going to
visit. All I knew was, that Dr. Morano presided
over the Demir-Khan to which I was bound.

I asked and walked till I was footsore.
Every one knew where it was, and showed me
a different way. I went every way I was told,
and nowhere found the Demir-Khan. I found
myself in the old clothes bazaar, in the tent
bazaar, in the street of the coppersmiths, among
the pipe-makers, in the horse market, in a
mosque court railed at by an old Turkish priest,
on the Bosphorus in the cushioned cradle of a
caïque, in the valleys, on the hills, threading an
aqueduct arch where fig-trees grew leafily out of
the walls, in burial-grounds among cypresses,
near barracks—but never at the madhouse.

At last, as I was resting to take some sherbet
at a stall, almost worn out—my head feeling as
dry and crusty with the heat as a well-baked
quartern loaf—I saw in the distance a Turkish
doctor whom I had met at a prison hospital,
riding along, preceded by his pipe-bearer.

May your shadow never be less, and the hairs
of your head never decrease. Demir-Khan?
Why, miles away outside the wall, out by the
Sea of Marmora, beyond the Seven Towers.

I thank him, hire a horse from one of those
numerous rows of hacks that stand ready saddled
in every public place of Constantinople, and
push off, calling out "Demir-Khan?" inquiringly
to every body I meet, be he pasha, or peach-
seller, Turk, infidel, heretic, or heathen.

Miles through lonely suburb streets, rough-
paved and shadowy, and I at last emerge, in full
blaze of the broad sun, through a city gate into
the open country beyond the Seven Towers, and
strike far to the left, beyond all the long
regions of leek gardens and melon beds, and the
rows of samboas and cherry-trees that follow the
triple line of ruined wall that girds the old city.

Here I get "warm," as children say, in a
double sense. I am getting near the Greek
Demir-Khan. I pass an Armenian convent
overlooking the blue sea, and there alight to let my
horse drink at a delicious fountain, sparkling,
cold and pure. I trample down the wild gourds
and other weeds to reach the edge of the cliff, and
there, looking over to the beach beneath, see
some Greek fishermen ankle deep in water,
joining hand in hand, and dancing their national
Romaika: not without shouts and splashings, they
being in the spirits that dabbling in sea water
without any clothes on seems always to produce.

I arrive at the gate of a huge enclosure, and,
going in, pass up through a garden that seems
all mulberry-trees and sunflowers. I am
informed that the doctor is not at home, but that
the superintendent, a little servile man in a
brown holland pinafore, will be proud to do
the honours.

He claps his hands, in the Arabian Nights
manner, and instantly appears "to him" an agile
Greek in white voluminous plaited kilt, and
black embroidered greaves, who bears in one
hand a shovelful of hot charcoal upon which
lazily smokes some incense, yielding a fat blue
fume and a pungent ecclesiastical odour.

He precedes us for sanitary reasons, and leads
us about the huge charity: first to the old men's
ward, then to the school; from room to room,
but not a word about the mad people. I believe,
after all, I have got to the wrong place, for now
the lean, dried up pedagogos makes the classes
of coarse young Greeks go through various
manœuvres to surprise the visitor. One young
Anastase is held up to me as the object of special
wonder, from his progress in acquiring Greek
hymns, and for his power of singing them, which
I am afraid he is going to do for my edification;
but I am preserved.

I descend at last, and go down among the
madmen, who scowl and gibber at me, pray at
me, and curse me. The special sight of the place,
as the turnkey thinks, is what I am at once taken
to see, the smoking incense preceding me in a
small pillar of cloud that sets the madmen
whispering. It is a Greek sailor, chained down
in a chair in a state of paroxysm, hands tied, feet
tied, and a girdle round the waist; yet still he