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cular, which was built by one of the merchants entirely out of the profits of a single voyage to Syria. ' But all my knowledge was vague, and I felt its vagueness most with regard to the present state of the town and the preser-vation of its ancient buildings. I had seen some photo-graphs of it. They showed me some old walls and a cathedral, a study of a Gothic window, and some miser-able mud-roofed houses. But there was no general or intelligible view of the place, and these fragments of it had bewildered rather than enlightened me. I was glad that this was so. It gave me the more to think about. In fact my mind was so well and so fully occupied that I had hardly had leisure to feel impa-tient when darkness had descended on the plains, and there were still no signs of our destination. Suddenly, however, without any apparent reason, the carriage came to a standstill, and a boy who had been brought by the driver—I could not conceive why—jumped down from the box. The lamps had already been lighted ; the boy took one of them and ran on as if to explore the way. To me nothing was visible, as I looked out, but bare rocky ground, whose ridges gleamed in the lamplight with so wan a bright-ness that I felt convinced there must have been a shower of rain. Scotty presently came to the window and said to me, ' The boy gone on, sir, to find out the way. The driver he not see it. The ground here covered with snow.' I looked again, and so it actu-ally was ; and the air, which at one o'clock had been like July in England, smelt and felt as keen as an 244 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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