In short, the poor fellow seemed to take an interest in my safety, and to wish to alleviate the pains of my mind; and he always concluded with a remonstrance against laughing, which, from frequently hearing, I now understood even in his own language." Don't laugh, Jimmel, don't laugh," he would say with great solemnity.—By the bye, I observed that when he was well disposed to me, he always called me Jimmel, (a name which I presume he constructed, with my servant's assistance, from the resemblance of sound between Campbel and Camel, Jimmel being the Turkish for that animal); and when angry, he called me Frangi, with all its gradations of Turkish abuse, Dumus, Cucu, &c.

That evening, as we sat in the caravansera, a man entered and spoke to Hassan, who seemed to pay great attention to what he was saying. He was a well made man, below the middle size-and had that kind of countenance which bespeaks shrewdness,ingenuity and mirth. At length he retired; and soon after Hassan bade us rise and follow him he went into a sort of public room, where a number of people were collected, sitting as is the custom in coffee-houses, on low stools. Hassan pointed to me to sit down, which I did: then placing the interpreter near us he sat himself: and straight I perceived the little man who had just been speaking to him step forth from the crowd and begin to pronounce a sort of prologue, which I neither understood nor wished to understand: it appeared from his cadences to be metrical, and seemed, by the little impression it made on his auditors, to have nothing particular to recommend it. At length, however, he paused, and hemming several times to clear his pipes, began again to hold forth. "He is going to tell a story," said the interpreter. The attention of all was fixed upon him, and he proceeded with a modulation of tones, a variety of action, and an energy of expression, that I think I have never heard or seen excelled his action indeed was singularly admirable; and I could perceive that he was occasionally speaking in the tones of a man and a woman in which latter character he gave a picture of whining ludicrous distress, that moved the risible muscles of all the company. I looked at Hassan, and he was

:

grinning as merrily as could any monkey or Frank in Asia. The Linguist occasionally interpreted what the storyteller was saying; and I soon began to suspect that it was a story I had more than once read in the Arabian Nights, though altered, and in some measure dramatized by the speaker. I looked several times archly at Hassan, and he returned my glance as much as to say, You see I don't laugh at all this. At length, however, the orator came to a part where he was to mimic a poor little hunch-back (for I now discovered it to be the story of little Hunchback) choking with a bone he threw up his back; squeezed till all the blood in his body seemed collected in his face, his eyes rolled in their sockets, his knees knocked, he twisted and folded his body, putting his fore-finger and thumb into his throat, and pulling with all his might, as if to pull something out at length he grew weaker, stretched his arms down, and his fingers back, like those of a person strangling-kicked, fell, quivered, and died. It is impossible for any description to do justice to the perfection of his acting; and what rendered it the more extraordinary was, that though it was a scene of death, and well acted death, he continued to render it so ludicrous in circumstances, as to suspend the audience between a laugh and cry. They did not remain long so; for he suddenly bounced up, and began the most doleful lamentation of a woman, and exhibited such a scene of burlesque distress as I never witnessed. All burst out in torrents of laughter, Hassan as well as the rest-I alone remained purposely serious; and the orator, according to custom, broke off in the middle of an interesting scene.

When we returned to the caravansera, I rallied the Tartar on the score of his laughter: he growled, and said, "who could avoid it? Why did not you laugh as you were wont ?"" Because," said I," he did not act as comically as you."-"No," returned he," but because Franks and monkies only laugh for mischief, and where they ought not. No, Jimmel, you will never see me laugh at mischief.""What," said I, "not at a poor man's being choked to death!"-"Nay," said he, " I seldom laugh, Yet I could not avoid it then." That very hour, however, a puppet-show was exhibited in the

same room, and my grave guide laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks, and his voice sunk into a whining treble. Kara ghuse was certainly extravagantly comical, though filthy; and frightened a cadi with a whole troop of Janissaries, by letting fly at them a shot or twoa parte post.

The next day we set out well mounted, and pushed on with renovated spirits towards Bagdad.-Hassan could no more have the assurance to censure laughing, and, as I was little disposed to do it in time of danger, we were likely to agree well. In short, we began to like one another's company; and if I brought him to be a greater laugher than he used to be, he gave himself the credit of having made me much more serious than I had been before I profited by his instructions.

It would be an effort as idle and fruitless on my part, as unentertaining and uninteresting on yours, to attempt to give you a regular detail of our progress from Mosul to Bagdad; the same general cautions were observed, with the same occasional relaxations. Hassan still continued to treat me with a repetition of himself and his horse, his own feats and his horse's feats; to be silent when ill-tempered, and loquacious when gay; to flog the attendants at the caravanseras; order the best horses, and eat the best victuals, and to give me the best of both; and finally we had our fallings out and our fallings in again: but I had not the mortification of seeing any more women tied in sacks on horses backs, and excoriated with a ride of fifty miles a day.

As we rode along we overtook several times straggling callenders, a kind of Mahomedan monks, who profess poverty and great sanctity; they were dressed all in rags, covered with filth, carried a gourd, by way of bottle, for water-I presume sometimes for wine too-and bore in their hands a long pole decorated with rags, and pieces of cloth of various colors. They are supposed by the vulgar to have supernatural powers: but Hassan, who seemed to have caught all his ideas from his betters, expressed no sort of opinion of them; he salam'd to them and gave them money, however. It was extraordinary

enough, that they were all in one story-all were going on a pilgrimage to Mecca-or, as they call it, Hadje.

was.

As soon as ever we got out of their sight and hearing, Hassan shook his head, and repeated" Hadje, Hadje!" several times doubtingly, and grinned as he was accustomed to do when he was displeased, without being able to manifest anger. "Hadje!" he would cry, (6 Hadje, Hadje!" I asked him what he meant; and he said, that these fellows were no more going to Mecca than I "I have a thousand and a thousand times," said he, "met callenders on the road, and always found them facing towards Mecca. If I am going southward, I always overtake them; if northward, I meet them; and all the time they are going wherever their business carries them. I overtook," continued he, "one of them one day, and I gave him ahms and passed him by; he was coming, he said, after me, towards Mecca: but I halted on purpose for a day, and he never passed; and a merchant arriving at the same caravansera informed me, he had met the very same fellow four leagues farther northward; who had answered him with the same story, and still had his face turned towards the south,"

Fifty years ago, no man in Turkey would have dared to hold his language; but every day's experience evinces that the light of reason spreads it rays fast through the world even through Turkey; and furnishes a well founded hope, that in another half century every monkish impostor (I mean real impostors) whether they be Mahomedan monks, or Christian monks, will be chased from society, and forced to apply to honest means for subşistence.

END OF PART II.

Ꭺ

JOURNEY TO INDIA.

PART III.

LETTER XLIII.

MY DEAR FREDERICK,

AFTER passing through an immense tract of

country, distinguished by nothing that could serve even as a circumstance to mark and remember our daily jour neys, but which I observed to grow manifestly worse, both in soil and climate, as we proceeded southward, we came in sight of the famous city of Bagdad, on the se venth day from that on which we left Mosul, and on the eighteenth from that of my departure from Aleppo; in which eighteen days we had rode fourteen hundred miles, partly through a route which no European, I have reason to believe, ever took before.

On entering the city, I desired my guide to conduct me to the house of a Merchant, to whom I had got let ters of credit and introduction. He took me accordingly through the windings of several streets, and at last stopped at the door of an Armenian Merchant, or Coja, where he made me alight, and come in. I was received with great politeness; and, on producing my letter,