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of the British consulate at Cairo, and have no projects independent of my friends."

"Ah!-is it so-then you need nothing from me. John Bull is in power here just now, and is your best protector. I am sorry that the company you are in may prevent my seeing much of you. But we'll meet somewhere again. Good by," said he, leaping on his Arabian. In a few minutes he was at the head of his troop, and in a few more, out of sight.

"Fare thee well," muttered I to myself, following him with my eyes till he was out of their reach, "better thus than as I saw thee lastbetter a Mahometan renegado than a profligate priest. But why Hussein? Zimri should be your name. You are the very Zimri of Dryden's glorious satire."

"In the first rank of these did Zimri stand;

A man so various that he seemed to be,

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Thus musing and quoting 1 rejoined my friends; whom, by the way, I did not let into the whole history of the Mameluke, as he had reposed some degree of confidence in me. I satisfied them with some general account of meeting a Turk whom I had seen before in England.

We returned to Cairo, and soon left Egypt. Six months after I landed once more in NewYork. Years rolled on, all pregnant with great events to the world, and with smaller ones of equal interest to myself. I did not talk any more about Egerton; for his transformations had now become so multiplied, that they began to sound too like a traveller's story to be told by as modest a man as I am. Besides there was then no need of telling any old stories; for those were the glorious and stirring days of Napoleon, when

"Events of wonder swelled each gale,

And each day brought a varying tale."

This

Meantime my natural instinct for travel-for it is certainly an instinct-Dr. Gall, himself, once pointed me out in his own lecture-room as wholly deficient in the organ of inhabitiveness, and equally conspicuous for my capacity for localities. instinct, though long restrained, was as ardent as ever; and when my old friend Commodore invited me to accompany him in his Mediterranean cruise, to try a new seventy-four, and parade our naval force before Turks and Christians, I could not refuse him.

Once more then I gazed on the towers and minarets of Constantinople. Once more that

fair scene-but all that is in Dr. Clarke and the other travellers, and I hate telling thrice-told tales.

Whilst at Constantinople, or rather in its suburbs, with a party of American officers, after having satisfied our curiosity, as far as we could, on the shore of European Turkey, my friends were anxious to take a look at the Asiatic coast, where the true Turk was to be seen in more unadulterated purity. So, among other excursions we went to Scutari. It is an old Turkish town, full of mosques, and monasteries of Dervishes; and the great lion of the place is the exhibition of the Mehveleveh, or dancing Dervishes, one of the very few religious ceremonies of the Mahometans which an infidel is allowed to witness.

It is a strange thing that there is so little variety among men in this large world. Nature is inexhaustible in her changes, but man is always alike. Here are we all, east, west, north, and south, and have been these two thousand years, telling and hearing the same stories, laughing at the same jokes, and playing the fool all over in the same dull way. That the business of life, and its science and its passions should be uniform, is a matter of course. People must, of necessity, till their fields and learn their mathematics, must make money, make war, make shoes, and make

love pretty much as the rest of the world do. But their fancies and their follies, one would think, might be dissimilar, irregular, wild, capricious, and original. Nevertheless the nonsense of the world smacks every where of wearisome sameness; and wherever the traveller roams, the only real variety he finds in man is that of coat, gown, cloak, or pelisse-hat, cap, helm, or turban-the sitting cross-legged or on a chairthe eating dinner with a fork or the fingers.

This nonsense of the dancing and howling Dervishes at Scutari, is very much the same nonsense that many of my readers must have seen at Lebanon and Niskayuna among our Shakers. It is a kind of dancing by way of religious exercises, at first heavy, and then becoming more and more violent. The chief difference is, that the Turks, when once excited, have more violence in whirling round and round on their tip-toes, with shouting and howling, than I have ever seen in our placid and well-fed Shaker monks. The Turks have, besides, the music of flutes and tambour, and the psalter of patriarchal days, which they accompany with a maniac guttural howling of Ullah-hoo, Ullah-hoo. Those who pretend to special sanctity, add some slight of hand tricks, such as seeming to drive daggers into their flesh, and taking hot irons into their mouths.

Altogether it is a very tedious and very disgusting spectacle.

The emir or abbot of the Mahometan monastery was old and feeble, and the chief duty of leading the dance and setting the howl, devolved upon a kind of aid-de-camp, to whom great respect was evidently paid. He had the ordering of the whole ceremony, and the arranging of spectators, and was in fact, as one of my naval companions called him, the Beau Nash of the Dervishes' ball-room.

He was a stout dirty Turk, with bushy grey locks and beard, dressed in the odd costume of his fraternity; his brow overshadowed by the cap which they wear instead of the graceful turban of the east, and his cheek swelled up with that tumour and scar, which is left by the peculiar distemper of some Syrian cities, and is called in Turkey, the Aleppo tumour. I remarked too, that his eyes, before he was excited by the dance, had that dreamy vacancy, and his skin that ghastly pale glossiness, which indicate the habitual opium taker.

This fellow eyed our party frequently and closely, and, as I thought, seemed to meditate some plan for laying us under special contribution.

When the dance was over, and the rabble, who formed the mass of the congregation, had gone

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