dinner time he brings home a bundle of common herbs or grasses,
which, next morning, he throws away. Then goes out again, and brings
home another bundle like it. Don't think he knows much about botany."
"What's your opinion of him?"
"Have hardly known him long enough to form one. He seems decidedly,
though, to have a military taste; takes great interest in the
movements of the troops."
"Fond of going up steeples?"
"When we enter a place, I believe he makes that his first object; at
least, whenever there is a steeple to the church."
"Ever see him making signals?"
"Never noticed anything of the kind."
"Know anything more about him?"
"He brought letters of introduction"--
"Oh, yes; I know all about that. Ever met him before you joined?"
"Can't say. First time we met at headquarters, thought I had heard
his voice."
"Where?"
"On our way up with treasure, we were opposed by the peasantry in
passing the ferry at--"
"Yes, yes; I know. See him with them?"
"No; I heard a voice, though, which I afterwards thought was very
like his."
"Then you didn't see him with them next day, I suppose, when they
wounded the officer of your escort?"
"I saw nothing of him then; wasn't near enough to distinguish
individuals."
"Oh, I suppose you don't use spectacles. Very well. Say nothing about
this."
My questioner then returned to the cottage. He didn't say good
morning; and, till I missed him from my side, I wasn't aware of his
departure. Then, looking round, I saw him quietly opening the door
and going in. Mr Wowski didn't come back to dinner, and we saw him
no more. Whether he was arrested, or merely advised to botanise
elsewhere, I never knew.
Following the movements of the army from place to place, we
approached at length the banks of the Garonne, and the neighbourhood
of Toulouse. We now halted for some days at the village of Seysses,
where, better off than many of my fellow-campaigners, I enjoyed the
luxury of a most enviable bed. On the earthen floor of my apartment
was arranged a small stack of faggots. This was the bedstead. On
the faggots was spread a lot of worn-out sacking, old clothes, and
equally ancient blankets, which, with a very clean pair of sheets,
constituted my bed. The first night, I was settling off for a snooze,
when a commotion, like a small earthquake, disturbed my _prima
quies_. Something was stirring, immediately under me! What can it be?
Why, I can feel it! It's in the bed! What's that again? A mixture
of squeaking and scrambling! Oh, rats. They had burrowed through
the floor, had established themselves in the faggots, had eaten
into the bedding, and there held their midnight revels. There they
lived and bred, squeaked and grunted, wriggled and fought, scurried
and cuddled, close under the sheet, undulating the whole surface
of the bed. Presuming that they would let me alone if I let them
alone, I again composed myself to sleep; and, so well was the truce
kept on both sides, I had them every night for my bed-fellows. If
the tumblification became intolerable, I had only to move, and in a
moment all was hushed. When I was still, they stirred; but when I
stirred, they were still.
Our last halting place, before we fought the battle of Toulouse,
was Grenade, a small town, or large village, a few leagues below
the scene of combat, on the left bank of the Garonne. Come, I'll
just give you a short account of my entertainment in one more
billet, and then we'll rush into the thick of the fight. Approaching
Grenade, with the mingled multitude that follow an army, I was met
by a French gentleman, who immediately addressed me, and entered
into conversation like an old acquaintance. That's the best of the
French. In five minutes we were intimate. He was a tall, hearty
fellow, in age about five-and-twenty, with rosy cheeks, curly hair,
broad shoulders, and prodigious development of the _poitrine_.
Begged to know who and what I was--my age, name, rank, and family.
Were my parents living? Had I brothers? A sister? Was I married or
unmarried? Had I any intentions? Ever felt the tender passion? What
was my pay _par mois_? Vilinton or Bonaparte, which did I consider
the greater general? Ever fought a duel? Were the English merry or
_tristes_? How did I like the French? But the French ladies? Which
excelled in female beauty, France or England? Been in many battles?
Was I Torrie or Ouigge? Would I accept of a billet in his _ménage_?
By this time my inquisitive friend had turned, and we were walking
on together towards Grenade. On our arrival there, he knocked at the
door of a great stack of a house in the market-place. In five minutes
Sancho was nuzzling a feed of oats in the stable, I was stropping
and lathering in an elegant bedroom, and my servant was making love
to Cookey in the kitchen. The fact is, when the news arrived that
the English were walking in, my new friend had walked out, to secure
an inmate to his mind, and I was the fortunate individual. The
Parisians ridicule provincials, and so do the Cockneys. But let me
tell both Cockneys and Parisians, they have nothing to boast above
the rural gentry whom they respectively despise, in good breeding, in
refinement, in cultivation, in bonhomie, in gentility, in anything
that constitutes a dignified, simple, and likeable character. Happy
family! Here, in one house, living together, and happy together,
kind, hospitable, loving, and beloved, resided an aged father, a
venerable mother, a charming daughter, three strapping sons--one
married, with his lively little titbit of a wife, the pet of the
household--two single, of whom my friend was the senior. There they
dwelt together, in domestic harmony and peace. Yet there too, in that
tranquil domicile, sorrow had found an entrance. A son was missing.
It was the old story; you couldn't travel through France in those
days, without hearing it a hundred times repeated. He had entered
the army--entered Spain--and no one knew what had become of him. The
family supper--what a meeting of friends, what a cheerful reunion!
Each treated the other with marked attention and kindness, as though
they were then first met after a long separation. The lady of the
house, "madame," advanced in years, but sharp, quick, cheerful,
and conversable, demanded from me a reply to the oft-repeated
interrogatory, which were fairer, the English fair or the French. I
tried to evade it. "No, no," said every voice at table; "Madame has
asked. Monsieur must reply."--"Most willingly would I obey," said I,
bowing till my nose touched the tablecloth; "but in your presence,
madame, how can I decide without prepossession?" (_prévention?_)
This compliment addressed to a dame of sixty-five, with gray hairs,
and nothing of beauty but its vestiges, you will of course say was
absurd, extravagant, and perfectly out of place. In England, I
grant, it would be. But there, in France, where a compliment paid
is a benefit conferred, and where civility, like a gift amongst
ourselves, is always accepted as a token of goodwill, it was viewed
with favour, and received with gratitude. The company, tickled, but
delighted, raised a shout of applause; and madame herself, smirking
and twinkling, made her acknowledgments with courtly elegance, as
though I had conferred an obligation; while her lovely daughter,
exclaiming, "Ah, maman!" flung her arms about her neck, with eyes
full of tenderness and delight. In short, I was one of the family.
In a week I quitted them with regret. The old gentleman made me a
parting present of cigars; a small token of gratitude, he was kind
enough to say, for the pleasure of my company; and that after I had
been hospitably lodged, handsomely entertained, and fèted from first
to last as if every day had been a jubilee.
Those cigars! Oh, those cigars! I never smoked the like of those
cigars! They beat General Thouvenot's out of the field. They were
at least three years old--nearer two pounds of them than one. You
may have smoked a good cigar. You may have smoked an old cigar. But
these united the two qualities; they were both old and good. The
military son had brought them with him from Spain, and left them
on his return to the army. The gift of them to me, then, implied a
melancholy sentiment; _he_ could not want them. This was expressed
by the father, in making the present. It was touching--it was
perfectly French. They had one fault, only one; a fault from which no
old cigars are free. They were gone too soon; they burned out like
tinder. But oh! while they were burning, how shall I describe the
sensation! Sensation? It was more than that; it was mental elevation;
a vision, a trance, a transfer to the regions of hope, imagination,
and enchantment. Every-day nature became prismatic. Matter-of-fact
sparkled with variegated lamps. Pledget might have smoked, and
fancied himself a poet. Each cigar a tranquillising stimulant, a
volatile anodyne, excited, and while it excited soothed, every
faculty of the soul; fancy, sentiment, recollection, anticipation,
and stern resolve. But ah, my cigar is out! A few puffs have
sufficed! Too soon, too soon, it begins to burn my nose! Its last,
its dying odours are hurried away by the envious breeze; and the
visions which they inspired are gone like a beautiful dream!
A MONTH AT CONSTANTINOPLE.[3]
[3] _A Month at Constantinople._ By ALBERT SMITH. London: 1850.
Books of travel in the region which modern tourists particularly
designate as "the East," and which may be considered to comprise
Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, do not, as a class, very forcibly challenge
our sympathy and criticism. The best horse may be ridden to death;
and no country, however rich in associations and peculiar in its
characteristics, however remarkable in configuration and interesting
by its traditions, can yield continual fresh pastures to literary
travellers, when they descend upon it like a swarm of locusts instead
of dropping in at reasonable intervals. Time must be allowed for
change and reproduction, or repetition and exhaustion will be the
inevitable result. The East, moreover, as a theme for book-wrights,
has not only been overdone, but, in many instances, very badly done.
People have gone thither with the preconceived idea of publishing,
on the strain for the marvellous, the romantic, and the picturesque;
and, disdaining the common-sense course of setting down what they
saw and giving their real and natural impressions, they have gilt
and embellished, like a coach-painter at a sheriff's carriage, till
they forced upon us the conviction that they cared more for glitter
than for truth. Some, piquing themselves on diplomatic acumen,
have filled their volumes with politics, and settled all manner of
Eastern questions much to their own satisfaction, and greatly to
the weariness of their readers; and these form perhaps the most
intolerable of the many classes into which Oriental travellers
are subdivisible, but which we shall not here further enumerate,
preferring to turn to the examination of the latest Eastern tour
that has issued from the English press and found its way to our
critical sanctum.
Mr Albert Smith's name, well known within sound of Bow-bells, is
far from unfamiliar to a large circle of dwellers without that
populous circumference. We cannot affirm that we have read all his
numerous works, but with some of them we are acquainted, and we
are disposed to think him one of the most amiable and praiseworthy
of the school of popular humorists to which he belongs. His jokes
are invariably good-humoured and inoffensive--without being on
that account deficient in point. He does not wrap radicalism up in
fun, as cunning grandmothers envelop sickly drugs with marmalade;
nor has his flow of gaiety a sour and mischievous under-current.
Neither does he belong to the gang of facetious philanthropists
whose sympathies are so exclusively granted to the indigent and
miserable, that they have nothing left but gall and bitterness for
those of their fellow-creatures who wear a decent coat, and have
the price of a dinner in its pocket. A gentleman of most versatile
ability, he is by turns dramatist, journalist, essayist, naturalist,
novelist, correspondent of a London paper, critic of the ballet,
a writer of songs and a manufacturer of burlesque. Such a host of
occupations naturally entails the necessity of a little relaxation;
and accordingly, in the summer of last year, Mr Smith laid down
his pen, shook the sawdust from his buskins, and started for the
Mediterranean. As far as Malta we have not ascertained how it fared
with him, but of his subsequent proceedings he has informed us in a
volume which we had little idea of reviewing when first we learned
its expected appearance, but whose perusal has convinced us that it
deserves such brief notice as the crowded state of our pages in these
busy days will permit us to bestow upon it. We have already implied
our opinion that it takes a skilful hand to write an amusing book
on so hackneyed a text as a visit to Constantinople. Mr Smith has
surmounted the difficulty in an easy and natural manner; and, whilst
telling things just as they appeared to him, without affectation
or adornment, he has contrived to give an agreeable freshness and
originality to a subject which we really deemed threadbare and
exhausted.
It was on board the _Scamandre_, French Mediterranean mail-steamer,
that Mr Albert Smith left Malta on an August evening of the year
1849, bound for Constantinople. The weather was fine and the sea
smooth as a lake, and there could be no reasonable apprehension of
shipwreck even for the crazy French vessel, whose last voyage, save
on rivers or along coast, this was intended to be. But although
somewhat rickety, of very moderate speed, and not particularly clean
externally, the interior accommodations of the Scamandre were by
no means bad. And the cabin passengers presented an amusing medley
of nations and characters. There were French milliners, striving
to pass themselves off as governesses, an elderly French actress
from the St James's theatre, a brace of Marseilles bagmen, an
enterprising Englishman bent upon smuggling muskets into Hungary, a
young Irish officer who had thrown up his commission in the British
service to campaign with Bem and Kossuth, and who must have arrived
at his destination just as the war reached its end. There was also
Mr Sophocles, an intelligent Greek professor from an American
university, on his way home after twenty years' absence, and sundry
persons unnamed, making about twenty in all, and Mr Smith himself,
who, we venture to say, was not the least active and efficient in
beguiling the tedium of a week's voyage in a slow steamboat, and
who gives us an extremely amusing account of his fellow-passengers
and their proceedings. Travelling quite as a citizen of the world,
without pretension or care for luxuries, now footing it across the
Alps with knapsack on shoulder, then a deck passenger from Genoa to
Naples, availing himself of the smooth when it offered, but taking
the rough readily when it came, sleeping sometimes on boards for
want of a bed, with the knapsack aforesaid for a pillow--Mr Smith
seems to have carried through the whole of his ramble those best of
travelling companions, imperturbable good humour, and a determination
to be pleased with everything and everybody. It is accordingly with
all possible indulgence that he views the little foibles of his
fellow-passengers per Scamandre, and there is not an atom of acid in
the dry humour with which he parades them for the entertainment of
his readers. Indeed, before the week's voyage is over, we begin to
feel quite intimate with the motley company--to view with indulgence
Mademoiselle Virginie's barefaced flirtations with the French
commissary, and to sympathise with the good-tempered American, who,
having had the misfortune to engage his berth in the first-class
cabin--a sort of extra-magnificent place, whose chief distinction
from the second class consists, as on German railways, in a heavy
additional charge--preferred now and then dining with the less
aristocratic inmates of the second cabin, "to know what was going
on." There is no place like shipboard for betraying people's habits
and peculiarities: everybody is more or less in deshabille; and such
a group as that on the Scamandre is a mine to a shrewd observer. Mr
Smith kept his eyes and ears wide open, as is his wont, and little
escaped him. We select the following specimen of his strictures on
foreign habits.
"I should be very sorry to class foreigners, generally, as a
dirty set of people when left to themselves; but I fear there
is too much reason to suppose that (in how many cases out of
ten I will refrain from saying) a disrelish for a good honest
plunging wash is one of their chief attributes. It requires but
very little experience, in even their best hotels, to come to
this conclusion. I do not mean in those houses where an influx
of English has imposed the necessity of providing large jugs,
baths, and basins; but in the equally leading establishments
patronised chiefly by themselves. In these, one still perceives
the little pie-dish and milk-jug, the scanty doily-looking
towel, and the absence of a soap dish; whilst it would be
perfectly futile to ask for anything further. So, on board
the Scamandre, this opinion was not weakened. They dipped a
corner of a little towel, not in the basin, but in the stream
that trickled from the cistern as slowly as vinegar from any
oyster-shop cruet, and dabbed their face about with it. Then
they messed about a little with their hands; and then, having
given a long time to brushing their hair, they had a cigarette
instead of a tooth brush, and their toilet was complete. This
description does not only apply to the Scamandre passengers, but
to the majority of their race, whom I afterwards encountered
about the Mediterranean."
We have a vivid recollection of the consternation of an amiable
and numerous French family, in whose house a friend of ours once
was domiciled, on finding that he each morning required, for his
personal use, more fresh water than sufficed for their entire daily
consumption, internal and external. Doubtless the worthy people
indulged, every eight days or so, in a warm bath; but they had no
notion of such a thing as diurnal ablutions above the waist or
below the chin, and they shrugged and grinned monstrously at the
eccentricity of the Englishman who commenced the day by a general
sluice, whereas they rarely thought of washing even their fingers
till they dressed for their ante-prandial promenade. And when our
friend was laid up, some time later, with a smart twinge of gout,
provoked by too liberal use of a very different liquid from water,
the entire family, from the elderly father down to the youngest of
the precocious juveniles, gave it as their unqualified opinion,
that the ailment proceeded from their inmate's rash and obstinate
indulgence in the ungenial and, in their opinion, extremely
superfluous element.
"Athens in six hours," Mr Smith observes, is rather quick work;
but he nevertheless found he could see in that time nearly as much
of it as he wished. The Scamandre allowed but a day, and certainly
he made good use of the brief halt. At Athens, as in Switzerland
and on the Rhine, he found the ubiquitous _Murray's Handbook_ the
great authority and certificate of the native competitors for
custom. A skirmish with clubs and boat-hooks--the former brought
evidently in anticipation of the contest--took place amongst the
fancy-ball-looking boatmen, in white petticoats and scarlet leggings,
who crowded in light skiffs round the foot of the steamer's ladder.
In the intervals of the fight a dialogue was carried on in English,
more or less broken.
"'I say, sir! here, sir! Hotel d'Orient is the best. Here's the
card, sir--old palace--Murray says ver good,' cried one of the
costumes.
"'Hi!' screamed another; 'don't go with him, master--too dear!
Come with me?'
"The parties were immediately engaged in single combat.
"'Hotel d'Angleterre à Athènes, tenu par Elias Polichronopulos
et Yani Adamopulos,' shouted another, all in a breath. I copy
the names from the card he gave me, for they were such as no one
could remember.
"'Yes, sir; good hotel,' said his companion. 'Look in Murray,
sir--page 24--there, sir; here, sir; look, sir!'
"'Who believes Murray?' asked a fellow in plain clothes, with a
strong Irish accent.
"'You would, if he put your house in the Handbook,' replied
another."
By considerable display of mental and physical energy, a few of the
passengers at last got into a boat and gained the quay of the Piræus.
_Grog's-shop_ was written on the shutter of a petty coffee-house,
and a smart-looking Albanian stepped up, and proffered his services
in excellent English. He had lived in London, he said: was a subject
of Queen Victoria, and had the honour of being set down in Murray,
page 25. With such recommendations, who could refuse the guidance
of Demetri Pomorn? Not Mr Smith and his party, evidently, for they
immediately engaged him for the day, hired a shabby vehicle from
an adjacent cab-stand, and started on their hot and dusty road to
Athens, thence about five miles distant. There they killed the lions,
ate quince ices, bought Latakia tobacco, dined at the Hotel d'Orient
_à l'Anglaise_, with Harvey sauce and pale ale, off English plates
and dishes, and pulled on board again at night, to the tune of _Jim
Crow_, played by an Anglified violin in one of the "grog's-shops"
aforesaid. At five in the morning sleep was at an end, thanks to
the clanking, stamping, and bawling upon the steamer's deck, and Mr
Smith left the cabin, to reconnoitre and breathe fresh air. Some
deck passengers had come on board at Athens; amongst others, a poor
Albanian family, bound to Smyrna to pack figs. They were miserable,
broken-spirited looking people, but picturesque in spite of their
poverty; a melon or two and some coarse bread composed their entire
stores for the voyage. This, however, was of no great duration, for
at daybreak the next morning the passengers per Scamandre were told
they were off Smyrna.
"It was very pleasant to hear this--to be told that the land I
saw close to us was Asia, and that the distant slender spires
that rose from the thickly clustered houses were minarets--that
I should have twelve hours to go on shore, and see real camels,
fig-trees, scheiks, and veiled women! And yet I could scarcely
persuade myself that such was the case--that the distant
Smyrna--of which I had only heard, in the Levant mail, as a
remote place, burnt down once a-year, where figs came from--was
actually within a good stone's throw of the steamer."
The travellers' expectations were more than realised. "I do not
believe," says Mr Smith, "that throughout the future journey any
impressions were conveyed more vivid than those we experienced
during our first half hour in the bazaars of the sunny, bustling,
beauty-teeming Smyrna." The appearance of a party of foreigners, and
of the well-known face of the _valet-de-place_, caused a stir amongst
the dealers, one of whom accosted Mr Smith in good English.
"'How d'ye do, sir; very well? that's right. Look here, sir;
beautiful musk purse; very fine smell. Ten piastres.'
"A piastre is worth twopence and a fraction.
"'How did you learn to speak English so well?' I asked.
"'All English gentlemen come to me, sir,' he said, 'and I learn
it from the ships, and from the Americans. Shake hands, sir;
that's right. Buy the purse, sir?
"'How much is it?' asked one of our party.
"'Six piastres,' replied the brother of the merchant, who also
spoke English, but had not heard the first price.
"'And you asked me ten!' I said to the other.
"'So I did, sir,' he replied with a laugh; 'then, if I get the
other four, that's my profit--eh? But what's four piastres to
an English gentleman?--nothing. It's too little for him to know
about. Come--buy the purse. What will you give?'
"'Five piastres,' I answered.
"'It is yours,' he added directly, with a hearty laugh, throwing
it to me.
"'What a merry fellow you are!' I observed.
"'Yes, sir; I laugh always; very good to laugh. English
gentlemen like to laugh, I know; laugh very well. Look at his
turban--laugh at that.'