a grimy box before him, containing his stock in trade. Then turning a corner one looks down the street of drapers, fluttering with handkerchiefs, scarves, and brilliant stuffs, as if it were hung with flags, the shops being caverns of shadow filled with half-seen bales. Before some of them are small raised platforms, which project a little into the roadway. On one of these a Nubian is quilting a stuffed coverlet, lying almost flat as he does so. On another an old Turk is squatting, superbly calm; and, as if customers had no existence for him, quietly sucks at the amber mouthpiece of his chibouk, or stretches his hands over a brazier of live charcoal. Farther on come glimpses of small shops of the barbers, as bare to the public eye as the rooms in a doll's house, then of cafés, with just as little privacy, where groups of men carousing at long tables are dimly visible under the obscurity of swarthy arches. A moment later we catch sight of an inky alley, which shows us the moving hands of a long succession of shoemakers. Another turn, and we are in the middle of fruits, vegetables, and groceries. Trays are on each side of us laden with oriental sweetmeats; behind them are huge oil jars

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and bulbous cheeses, like turnips; everywhere are dangling bunches of yellow candles, ready for burning at shrines, tombs, or altars; and often we came to a whole space made brilliant with pyramids of pale lemons, or wax-colored stacks of radishes. Again another turn, and we are in the smoke-blackened street of the iron workers, with forges far in the darkness, fizzing and spluttering fitfully and at the end of this very likely we are back again at the point from which we started. And through all these streets, from morning till evening, the most motley throng keeps moving. Dark European costumes push and jostle their way amongst flowing robes of every imaginable color; and the faces are of every shade from white to the glossiest ebony. Turbans, felt hats, yashmaks, and fez caps, pass and repass each other, till one becomes dizzy in watching them. Above them are seen moving tall earthenware pots, poised on undistinguishable heads, or a way is forced by a big plank-like tray, on which a baker carries a row of rolls; while from time to time there is a sudden crush and movement, as a bullock cart advances slowly, with the animals' huge horns swaying.

Let us quit this scene, and pass down a quiet street that leads from it. Turning a corner we suddenly find before us a narrow alley spanned by a succession of arches. We look up, and we suddenly find that they are neither more nor less than the flying buttresses of the cathedral. We have travelled 2,000 miles. The cathedral, it is true, is now used as a mosque, and in place of the original tower there are now two minarets: but the building still has its old Christian air about it, and it fills its precinct with suggestions of a quiet English town. Nor is the cathedral alone in doing this. Almost touching it is another medieval church-a mass of exquisite carving; on the opposite side of a square is an old brown building that was once an archbishop's palace; and in every direction are western coats of arms, one of which I recognized as that of an extinct Devonshire family. I used always to expect every moment in this neighborhood to see a curate coming round the corner: but instead of a curate, the only black thing visible was a naked Soudanese fanatic who passed among the Mahometans for a saint, and who, I was told, would probably break

my camera, if ever he saw it directed toward the temple of Allah.

And now, with eyes grown more accustomed to such surroundings, let us go back to the hush of the other quarters-to the shadowy labyrinthine ways. We shall presently begin to discover many things which at first we had never noticed. We shall see that the lower stone work on which the mud superstructures rest is in many places ancient and beautifully pointed masonry, with here and there in it signs of a walled up crusader or fragments of broken moulding. We shall see that the doors one after another are arches of pointed Gothic; and their crumbling coats of arms are still surmounting some of them; and we shall gradually realize that these mysterious houses round us all stand on the foundations of mediaval Christian palaces. Inwardly, however, we shall notice Christian emblems or walls whose character is at once felt to be different; and here or still lower we are looking at the church of the Armenians; here at a Greek Basilica; or here into the long cloisters of a Greek or Maronite monastery.

Having strayed through the streets, let us now penetrate into the interiors. The houses are, roughly speaking, all of the same pattern. They are built round two, or sometimes three, sides of a garden, with open arcades from which the rooms are entered. The staircases sometimes rise through the inner parts of the building, sometimes in arches in the open air; and they terminate sometimes in a corridor with glazed windows, sometimes in a second arcade, or in a deep loggia. As a rule the wood work is rude, and the ceilings, unplastered, exhibit a row of rafters, backed by a kind

er considerable areas. One in which I spent several weeks, and which in comparative size was moderate-even small, had a frontage to the street of a hundred feet, and a depth of two hundred; while one, half in ruins, which I had to explore continually, must have enclosed within its walls something far more than an acre. Nothing can be imagined richer in quaint views than the garden thus secured, with the polished sky showing cloudless overhead, and a tall tower or minaret peering over the walls from a distance. I have said that the classical times have left little behind

of matting. Here and there, indeed, is a house where every lintel and door is carved, and the ceilings are arabesques of color; these, however, are exceptions. But the rooms are always numerous, large, and lofty; and they are constantly broken by graceful arches, which in the scarcity of good timber, help to support the roof. The arches, too, which surround the gardens, high, slim, and pointed, are a really beautiful feature, and stamp the scene with a peculiar architectural character. These houses cov

them that was above ground; but they have left something. Here in these gardens, amongst the green gloom of the orange-trees, are fountains built out of blocks of antique carved marble; violets will be growing round a white Corinthian capital; or stuck into the ground as a careless border for a flowerbed will be a broken slab with the letters on it of an Hellenic inscription; and thus through all the later ages of history comes a faint echo from a past that is beyond the past.

in the aspect of its capital. In the division of the Roman Empire, it was naturally included in the eastern portion; for as many centuries as lie between ourselves and William the Conqueror, it was under the sway of Byzantine emperors or their dependents. But about the year 1190, Richard I. of England, on his way to Palestine, was drawn aside to its shores, by a curious train of circumstances. Some ships of his fleet had been wrecked, during a storm, near Limasol; and those on board them, instead of receiving assistance, had been treated by the Cyprian governor with a studied and contemptuous cruelty. As luck would have it, amongst the sufferers was no less a person than the king's betrothed, Berengaria. The king therefore no sooner learned the news than he landed, full of fury and bent on vengeance or satisfaction. The governor, Isaac Comnenus, not only refused the last, but so aggravated his offence by the manner in which he did so, that Rich

him to be an encumbrance; and having presently sold it for a large sum to the Templars, and having had it directly after returned on his hands by them, he eventually made it over to Guy de Lusignan-the younger son of a French country gentleman, who arriving in Palestine as a penniless young adventurer, married a queen of Jerusalem, was himself elected king of it, and after her death finding his position precarious, was glad to abandon it, and accept the principality of the neighboring island. Thus was founded a dynasty which flourished three hundred years, which rose to a splendor and opulence then almost unparalleled, and was surrounded by a feudal aristocracy, in its own degree equally splendid. In time, however, reverses began to come. About the end of the fourteenth century, the Genoese seized upon Famagosta, the principal port; and they held this, despite the efforts to oust them, as a kind of commercial Gibraltar, for ninety years.

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while, owing to various other causes, the power and authority of the Lusignan kings was waning. During the During the reign of the last of them, indeed, Famagosta was recovered; but he died prematurely, and left in his place a widow. This widow was the beautiful Catherine Cornaro, of Venice, whose eyes and lips in Florence still smile on us from the canvas of Titian, the most fascinating face in the whole Uffizi Gallery: and she, having lost her infant and only son, finally resigned her kingdom in favor of the Venetian Republic. The Venetians held the island for eighty years; and then were driven from it by the Turks under the sultan Selim. The Turks held it

for 300 years, like the Lusignans; and at the end of that period the conquest of the crusading Plantagenet passed but yesterday for the second time to England.

Such is the history embodied not only in the stones of Nicosia, but also in its existing life. In spite of the changes of rule to which Cyprus has been subjected, the bulk of the population have remained in race and character much what they were under the Byzantine dukes or emperors. Today no more than onethird are Mahometans. As for the rest, their religion, as it always has been, is that of the Greek Church. The Church of Rome, in spite of its abbeys and its cathedrals, was the church of the ruling classes, never that of the people and under the Catholic domination the two communions existed side by side, each with its own institutions. But the

crusading nobles are gone, and the muezzin cries from their cathedrals; oxen and mules or the wild doves are in their chapels, whilst from the Greek campanili the bells are still sounding, congregations kneel before screens of gorgeous gilding, and hardly a mountain side is without its inhabited monastery. On the other hand, what the Mahometans lack in numbers they make up for by the possession of important buildings and the character, which, during their rule, they have impressed upon things generally. They have orientalized in appearance a race that was half oriental always: and they and that race divide the island between