Vivandière du régiment,
C'est Catin qu'on me nomme,
Je vends, je donne, et bois gaiment,
Mon vin et mon rogomme.
J'ai le pied leste et l'oeil mutin.
Tin-tin, tin, tin, tin, tin, r'lin tin-tin.
J'ai le pied leste et l'oeil mutin.
Soldats, voilà Catin!
Above all other voices, I could hear that of her friend, or lover, Jules Jolicoeur, most lustily—
Soldats, voilà Catin!
as he marched along with his hands in his pockets, and his musket slung butt uppermost. Our transport was taken in tow by a war steamer. Thus our progress through the Sea of Marmora was rapid. We passed Constantinople in the night, to our great regret; and as no part of it, save the palace of the Sultan, was then lighted with gas, it was involved in darkness and silence. At least, we heard only the voices of the patrols, and the barking and howling of the thousands of homeless dogs which prowl through the streets. Being unclean, they are never domesticated; yet their litters are never destroyed, and they feed on the offal of the houses, or on the headless trunks that are at times washed up from the Golden Horn. Next day, as we proceeded up the Bosphorus, a swift (Clyde-built) Turkish steamer was running ahead of us; and we remarked that, whenever she passed a fort or battery, the standard with the star and crescent was immediately hoisted, and a trumpet was heard to sound.
At the Castle of Roumelia, and such places, we saw the slovenly Turkish guards getting under arms, and also that on each occasion the standards were dipped or lowered to half-mast three times. This indicated that the ship had on board a pasha of three tails, or one of equal rank, whose standard was flying at the foremast-head; and soon after we learned that he was the munadjim bashee, or chief astrologer, one of the first officers of the seraglio, and always consulted by the Sultan Abd-ul-Medjid. No public work was ever undertaken until he declared the stars to be propitious; and now he was steaming ahead to see how they looked at Varna! By the letter I had despatched from Gallipoli, I had, to a certain extent, relieved my mind, as I concluded that at Varna I should receive the answer, and that then all my suspense and anxieties would end, in the course of a few weeks at latest.
Against the strong current which sets in from the Black Sea, and which runs at the rate of four miles an hour down the Bosphorus, we steamed steadily on; and as the wind was fair, our transport carried a tolerable spread of canvas. Our sail was a delightful one! The weather was calm, and the scenery and objects on the European and Asian shores were ever changing and attractive. The abrupt angles and bends of the coast seemed to convert the channel into a series of seven charming inland lakes of the deepest blue—there being seven promontories on one side, and seven bays on the other, each bay running into a fertile valley, clothed with the richest foliage of the Oriental clime; and amid that waving foliage rose the quaint and fantastic country dwellings of the wealthy Frankish, Greek, or Armenian merchants of Stamboul, with their painted kiosks, gilded domes, and towering minarets, tall, white, and slender.
On the left or European shore, the whole panorama was a succession of beautiful villages, terraced gardens, and groves of chestnut, plane, and lime trees, with here and there long, sombre, and solemn rows of gigantic cypresses and poplars. On the right or Asian shore, the objects of Nature were of greater magnitude. The groves became forests, and the hills swelled into mountains; and, towering over Brussa, rose Olympus, "high and hoar," covered with laurels and other evergreens to its summit.
Under a salute of cannon from the Castle of Europe, and still preceded by our Turkish friend, the astrologer with three tails, we hauled up for Varna, giving a wide berth to the dangerous Cyanean rocks, between which Jason steered the Argonauts in equally troublesome, but more classic, times.
From thence a run of about one hundred and fifty miles brought us to the low flat shore of Varna, where, on the 28th of May, we were all landed without accident or adventure, and placed under canvas among the rest of the troops. The aspect of Varna from the bay was somewhat depressing. Rising from a bank of yellow sand, a time-worn rampart of stone, ten feet high, loop-holed and painted white, encloses the town on its four sides, each of which measures somewhat more than a mile. This old wall had witnessed the defeat and death of Uladislaus of Hungary, by the troops of the Padishah Amurath II., and it yet bore traces of the cannon-shot of the Scoto-Russian Admiral Greig, who bombarded Varna in 1828.
Before the walls lies a ditch, twelve feet deep, and over both frown a number of heavy guns, which I found to be chiefly sixty-eight pounders; and over all rose the countless red-tiled roofs of the houses, with the slender white minarets and round leaden domes of the mosques, looking like wax-candles by the side of inverted sugar basins. Beyond, in the distance, stretched far away to the base of wooded hills the flat Bulgarian shore.