reputation accordingly. It is now, like all the old churches of Salonica, a mosque. We made vain attempts to find the hodja-the beadle who keeps the keys. -and so were obliged to content ourselves with a survey of the outside.1

It is

Not far off is a curious monument of old Thessalonica, which had already fallen in my way the day before. a decorative façade, whether of an agora, a hippodrome or other public building, of two stories, the first columns with plain shafts and Corinthian capitals, supporting horizontal architraves and entablature, above which, at equal distances, are four pilasters, with a statue in high relief on either side supporting a cornice. The whole is of white marble, and some of the blocks resting on the pillars are of enormous size-one, for instance, which I measured roughly, is twelve feet long, four wide, and two high. The pairs of statues, which are much mutilated, appear to represent-1. Ganymede and Leda. 2. Paris, with goat and Phrygian cap, and Ceres. 3. Venus

and Bacchus with his panther. 4. A winged Victory and Triton blowing a horn. The combination is somewhat bizarre; but, probably, as both figures could not be seen at once they were not intended to have any relation to each other. The work appears to belong rather to Macedonian than Roman times; but, considering the eclecticism and imitative spirit which prevailed from the time of Alexander to that of Hadrian, it is impossible to pronounce a definite opinion. The Spanish Jews who form the great mass of the inhabitants of Salonica, call these figures, "Las Incantadas," supposing them to have been petrified by magic. Several Jewish families occupy the house which is

1 Mr. Finlay, whom I saw afterwards at Athens, told me that he had failed also to find the hodja. The church, however, he says, is not so old as it looks. Over the door are the words πατριαρχης και κτήτωρ, and the same words are inscribed on the pillars of the portico, with the addition of the name of this patriarch and founder-Niphon. Now, Niphon the First was patriarch from 1313 to 1315, and to him, doubtless, the building of the church must be assigned.

attached to the edifice, and it is only by entering and going upstairs that one can obtain a good view of the sculptures. A host of young Israelites surrounded us, begging in clamorous and shameless fashion. On a kind of terrace, on the second story of the house, they had put up a wooden frame-work intertwined with reeds. This, they told us, was for the celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles on the following Saturday. With what tenacity does this people cling to the outward ceremonies of their religion! After all their wanderings from Palestine to Italy and Spain, and thence back to the Eastafter all their persecutions, we find them practising in the midst of a busy commercial city a custom learnt 3,000 years ago in the deserts of Arabia. Yet, if general report may be trusted, the Jews of Salonica are a most degraded race, and have long forgotten the moral teaching of their sacred books.

The population of Salonica is estimated by the best informed of its inhabitants at 70,000, of whom 50,000 are Jews, 10,000 Greeks, and 10,000 Turks. To this we must add about 400 Turks, consuls, merchants, and refugees, Italian or Hungarian. Our next visit was to the Eski Djaniss, or old mosque," which

has been a church-what church our conductor did not know. It is in the form of a basilica. It has a nave and two aisles, and a gallery for women corresponding to our triforium. At the eastern end is an apse. The length of the nave is forty-four paces, its breadth eighteen, and that of each aisle eight. There are on each side twelve columns, with plain shafts and capitals of contorted and exaggerated foliage, with Ionic volutes. They belonged probably to a church still earlier than the present building, for the arches spring from capitals placed upon the former capitals, of much ruder design and workmanship. The only persons in the mosque beside ourselves were some Jews, who were engaged in beating the husk from some boiled wheat for the use of the Turkish hodja. They had put the corn in what had been the Christian

font, hollowed out of a pagan cippus or tombstone, on which the inscription in Greek was still legible. It would be difficult to imagine a stranger combination of creeds.

S. Sophia's-now, of course, a mosque -was built in humble imitation of its namesake at Constantinople. The Turks added a portico supported with marble pillars and a minaret. In front is a court with some plane lime and cypress trees. The entrance to this court dates from Christian times, as does the octagonal belfry tower. Inside are six pillars of verde antique with the foliage of the capitals violently contorted, as if in a high wind-the same style which we had observed in the basilica. Some short pillars support the Gynæconitis, or women's gallery above. In the dome is a mosaic of the Ascension, the Virgin and the Apostles standing round, with trees between each figure. The figure of our Lord has been obliterated by the Turks, and its place supplied by an inscription; the feet, however, are still left, supported by two angels. The whole verse, "Ye men of Galilee," &c. is inscribed on the mosaic. In the apse is another mosaic of the Virgin and Child. The great treasure of the church is a pulpit of verde antique, called St. Paul's. From the style of its rude carvings, it cannot be older than the fifth or sixth century, and may be much later.

The so-called "Arch of Constantine " spans what I have before mentioned as the main street of the old, as it still is of the modern town, the Via Egnatia. It is now reduced to mere naked brickwork, except the basement, which is covered with sculptures in high relief, unfortunately concealed for the most part by wooden shops. One of the sides represents, in the upper division, an emperor entering a town in a triumphal car. There is a touch of humour in the introduction of Cæsar's dog trotting by his side. In the lower compartment is a battle. The workmanship seems to me more like the time of Trajan. If the arch be called Constantine's on any good authority, it may be an earlier arch

renamed, or the figures may have been stolen to adorn it, as in the Arch of Constantine at Rome. Only a fragment of the original gate remains. It has evidently been quadruple, in the form. of the Arc de l'Etoile at Paris.

The Rotunda was, it is said, a temple of Castor and Pollux before it was the Church of St. George. The form is indicated by the name. Perhaps it was originally suggested by the Pantheon. The walls are twenty-two feet thick, and its interior diameter eighty feet. At the time of its conversion an apse was added. Round the lower part of the dome are some curious mosaics, figures of Apostles, &c., in eight compartments, standing under an arcade, or portico, of highly ornamental architecture-such as Paul Veronese was fond of introducing in his pictures—with here and there a peacock or other gorgeous bird perched aloft, and in each a Greek inscription, which the distance and the dim light prevented me from reading. In the pavement of the floor are pieces of pavonazetto and fragments of pilasters, which, probably, once faced the walls.

In the precinct of the mosque is a pulpit, which disputes with that in St. Sophia the honour of having been St. Paul's. This is of white marble, larger and more elaborate than the other, but almost as rude in workmanship. It has been intended to stand against a wall, and is ascended by a winding staircase of six steps. Its height is six feet three inches. On the top is a very small space for the preacher to stand or sit, and no appearance of balustrade to prevent him falling off. In the pulpit in St. Sophia's, still used by the Turks, the preacher sits, and there is a cushion for his accommodation. This is only used as a plaything for children, half a dozen of whom were clustered about it. On the outside are three niches, rounded at top in the shape of a shell, and divided by a little column and foliated capital. In each niche is a rude, misshapen figure of a barbarian soldier in trousers and Phrygian cap, reminding one of the figures which stand over the Arch of Constantine at Rome, and were stolen,

as I have before said, from the Arch of Trajan. But this is a ruder and, probably, a much later work, and over each capital an eagle in low relief. One of the capitals had been freshly broken off: a piece of vandalism, of which I was sorry to hear that an Englishmanor, rather, an Irishman-had been guilty. He was in command of one of Her Majesty's ships, and ought to have set a better example. This pulpit, if we assign to it the latest possible date, is a precious relic of Christian antiquity. If it had been, as this Captain O'Vandal, doubtless, supposed it to be-the pulpit of St. Paul-his offence would have been not merely barbarous, but sacrilegious. We had some difficulty in getting admission to the mosque, which was the church of St. Demetrius. It was now nearly one o'clock, and the time when every good Mussulman takes a snooze -as regularly as he says his prayers. We kicked violently at the hodja's door, and at last succeeded in wakening, to a certain extent, his beadleship's son; a fat, handsome, heavy-eyed youth of seventeen, who put his head out of the window and told us to wait, which we did, while he withdrew apparently to finish a dream that he was about. At last, he came down and opened the church-door, and forthwith sat down on a step with his head against a pillar and resumed his slumber, leaving us to examine the place at our leisure. We found ourselves in a spacious building, more like the type of a Western church than any we had yet seen, with nave and double aisles, triforium, and clerestory. The triforium, or women's gallery extended over the outer aisle on each side. The columns were of verde antique, and a white, blue veined marble. There were also four columns of red Egyptian granite; all, no doubt, spoils of various temples of pagan Thessalonica. The church was paved throughout with marble of a blueish tint. On the northern wall of the nave is a monument in the Renaissance style, with a long Greek inscription commemorating a certain Spadrone, a Greek, who left

his money to found an institution for the education of his countrymen. The date is Я.. П. . i. e. 6989, reckoned, in the usual Byzantine fashion, from the creation of the world. The date of the Christian era is, according to this mode of counting, 5508, deducting which, we get for the date of the monument, 1480 A.D., which is remarkable as showing that the Turks left to the Christians at Salonica, as at Constantinople, the possession of their churches long after the Conquest. Salonica has been continuously in the possession of the Turks since its capture by Murad II., in 1430.

There is a well in the church (a very common case) of pure cold water. We can scarcely doubt that the same well had been protected by a pagan temple, as it was afterwards by a Christian church, and is now by a Mahometan mosque. In these countries water is the first necessity, and the crowning luxury; water is fertility, abundance, life; the want of water is famine, desolation, lation, death. What wonder if so precious a thing were attributed to the popular imagination to a special bounty of a God or saint-if temples were erected to serve at once for the safe keeping of the treasure and as memorials of the gift!

The church, too, possesses another treasure in the grave of St. Demetrius himself, illustrious for many miracles, and a place of pilgrimage to this day. The Turks do not interfere with a practice which their own customs sanction, and which brings them in a considerable profit. The Turkish hodja is paid for trimming the lamp which is kept always burning over the grave. There is no inscription on the stone which is supposed to cover the saint's bones. Once a year on the feast day, the little vault is filled from morning to night with crowds of worshippers, whose hot breath, condensed into drops on the cold stone, is supposed to be the sweat of the saint's bones miraculously exuding, and of sovereign efficacy if rubbed on ulcers, or any ailing parts of the body.

CHAPTER VII.

"Now," said Tom, "I am ready to be off, if it's to the world's end."

"Ah!" said the fairy, "that is a brave, good boy. But you must go further than the world's end, if you want to find Mr. Grimes; for he is at the Other End Of Nowhere. You must go to Shiny Wall, and through the white gate that never was opened; and then you will come to Peacepool, and Mother Carey's Haven, where the good whales go when they die. And there Mother Carey will tell you the way to the Other End Of Nowhere, and there will find Mr. Grimes." you "But I do "Oh, dear!" said Tom. not know my way to Shiny Wall, or where it is at all."

"Little boys must take the trouble to find out things for themselves, or they will never grow to be men; so that you must ask all the beasts in the sea and the birds in the air, and if you have been good to them, some of them will tell you way to Shiny Wall." “Well," said Tom, "it will be a long journey, so I had better start at once.

the

Good-bye, Ellie; you know I am getting

a big boy, and I must go out and see the world."

"I know you must," said Ellie; "but you will not forget me, Tom. I shall wait here till you come."

And she shook hands with him, and bade him good-bye. Tom longed very much again to kiss her; but he thought it would not be respectful, considering she was a lady born; so he promised not to forget her but his little whirlabout of a head was so full of the notion of going out to see the world, that it forgot her in five minutes: but though

his head forgot her, I am glad to say his heart did not.

So he asked all the beasts in the sea, and all the birds in the air, but none of them knew the way to Shiny Wall For why? He was still too far down south.

Then he met a ship, far larger than he had ever seen a gallant ocean-steamer, with a long cloud of smoke trailing behind; and he wondered how she went on without sails, and swam up to her to see. A school of dolphins were running races round and round her, going three feet for her one, and Tom asked them the way to Shiny Wall: but they did not know. Then he tried to find out how she moved, and at last he saw her screw, and was so delighted with it that he played under her quarter all day, till he nearly had his nose knocked off by the fans, and thought it time to move. Then he watched the sailors upon deck, and the ladies, with their bonnets and parasols: but none of them could see him, because their eyes were not opened-as, indeed, most people's

eyes are not.

gallery a very pretty lady, in deep black widow's weeds, and in her arms a baby. She leaned over the quarter-gallery, and looked back and back toward England far away; and as she looked she sang:

At last there came out into the quarter