"Allah kerim! you must have a great deal of it to have borne that great nose so long about you," she retorted, as she hurled her slipper at his head.
A pair of dark and brilliant eyes, sparkling through the folds of a fine white muslin yashmac, were very nearly the means of ridding me of Berkeley, and the impending duel, while we lay at Varna.
He and Frank Jocelyn, of my troop, a smart and handsome young fellow, whilom the prime bowler and stroke oar at Oxford, as good-hearted and open-handed a lad as any in the service, began an intrigue with two Turkish damsels, whom they found at prayer before an aekie, or Mahommedan wayside chapel, and whom they followed home to a kiosk in the vale of Aladyn.
Their love affair did not make much progress, being simply maintained by tossing oranges in the dusk over a high wall, which was furnished with a row of vicious-looking iron spikes. The oranges of Jocelyn and Berkeley contained notes written in French and Italian, of which the girls could make nothing, of course, the language of the educated Turks being a mixture of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, the former being spoken by the peasantry alone; so the ladies responded by oranges, in which flowers were stuck, till on the fourth or fifth night, in reply to a very amatory epistle, souse came over the garden wall an iron six-inch shell, with its fuse burning!
Our Lotharios had only time to throw themselves flat on the ground, when it exploded in the dark with a dreadful crash; but without hurting either of them, and they retired, somewhat crestfallen, while hearing much loud laughter and clapping of hands within the garden wall. After this rough hint, they went no more near the ladies, who proved to be the wife of a yuse bashi, or captain of Turkish artillery, and her female slave.
While the months we wasted so fruitlessly at Varna crept slowly away, there occurred to me a singular adventure—in fact, one so remarkable in its import, and in reference to the future, that it still makes a deep impression upon me; and this episode I shall detail in the following chapter.
CHAPTER XXXI.
So gaze met gaze,
And heart saw heart, translucid through the rays,
One same harmonious universal law,
Atom to atom, star to star can draw,
And heart to heart. Swift darts, as from the sun,
The strong attraction, and the charm is done.
THE NEW TIMON.
To the letter I wrote Louisa from Gallipoli no answer was ever returned.
Had it reached her, or been intercepted, and by whom?