"The fishermen are, almost without exception, Bulgarians—a population at once maritime and agricultural, very closely resembling, in race and costume, the Bretons of France—and they enjoy a monopoly of all the fisheries in the Bosphorus and the adjacent parts of the Black Sea. Their elegant barks appeared on stated days and hours, shooting along with extraordinary rapidity through the waters of the Gulf of Buyuk Déreh, which appears to be their head-quarters, and sustaining the test of comparison even with the famous caiques of Constantinople. The most important object of their fishery is a delicious kind of small thunny, called palamede. They are Bulgarians, also, who own the singular fisheries which form such admirable subjects for the artist's sketch-book. They are found throughout the Bosphorus, from Bechiktusch and Scutari to the lighthouses of Europe and Asia. They might be called dog-kennels, but rickety and worm-eaten with antiquity, and are suspended by means of cords, pegs, and tatters to the top of an indescribable framework of props. There on high, petrified in motionless and uninterrupted silence, in company with some old pots of mignionette (where will not the love of flowers find a home!), a man, with the appearance of a wild beast or savage, leans over the sea, at the bottom of which he watches the passage of its smallest inhabitants, and the capricious variations of the current. At a certain distance is arranged, in the form of a square, a system of nets, which, at the least signal from the watcher, fall on the entire shoal of fish. A contrivance yet more primitive than these airy cells, if not so picturesque, was that of simple posts, which we encountered some time before in the channel of the Bosphorus, rising about fifteen feet above the surface of the water. Half-way up is perched, crouching (one cannot see how), something having the human form, and which is found to be a Bulgarian. For a long time I watched them without being able to make them out, either pole or its tenant; and often have I seen them in the morning, and observed them again in the evening, not having undergone the least change of posture.
"On returning to our encampment, the commandant of the fort, to whom we paid a visit, gave us a very different report of the fishermen of the morning, whom he described as an assemblage of all the vagabonds of the neighbourhood. Convinced even that the fact of their having fallen in with us must have inspired them with the project of coming to prowl by night round our camp, he wished us to accept some of the men in his garrison as a guard."
HORSES OF THE ARABS.
Arabs make intimate friends of their horses, and so docile are these creatures that they are ridden without a bit, and never struck or spurred. They share their owner's diet, and are as well cared for as a child. They divide their horses, however, into two kinds: The one they call kadischi, that is, horses of an unknown birth; the other, they call kochlani, that is, horses whose genealogy is known for thousands of years. They are direct descendants, so they say, of the stud of Solomon. The pedigree of an Arabian horse is hung round his neck soon after his birth, which is always properly witnessed and attested.
The following is the pedigree of a horse purchased by a French officer in Arabia:—"In the name of God, the merciful and compassionate, and of Saed Mahomed, agent of the high God, and of the companions of Mahommed, and of Jerusalem. Praised be the Lord, the Omnipotent Creator. This is a high-bred horse, and its colt's tooth is here in a bag about his neck, with his pedigree, and of undoubted authority, such as no infidel can refuse to believe. He is the son of Rabbamy, out of the dam Labadah, and equal in power to his sire of the tribe of Zazhalah; he is finely moulded, and made for running like an ostrich. In the honours of relationship, he reckons Zuluah, sire of Mahat, sire of Kallac, and the unique Alket sire of Manasseh, sire of Alsheh, father of the race down to the famous horse, the sire of Lahalala; and to him be ever abundance of green meat, and corn, and water of life, as a reward from the tribe of Zazhalah; and may a thousand branches shade his carcass from the hyæna of the tomb, from the howling wolf of the desert; and let the tribe of Zazhalah present him with a festival within an enclosure of walls; and let thousands assemble at the rising of the sun in troops hastily, where the tribe holds up under a canopy of celestial signs within the walls, the saddle with the name and family of the possessor. Then let them strike the bands with a loud noise incessantly, and pray to God for immunity for the tribe of Zoab, the inspired tribe."
DILEMMA.
Protagoras, an Athenian rhetorician, had agreed to instruct Evalthus in rhetoric, on condition that the latter should pay him a certain sum of money if he gained his first cause. Evalthus when instructed in all the precepts of the art, refused to pay Protagoras, who consequently brought him before the Areopagus, and said to the Judges—"Any verdict that you may give is in my favour: if it is on my side, it carries the condemnation of Evalthus; if against me, he must pay me, because he gains his first cause." "I confess," replied Evalthus, "that the verdict will be pronounced either for or against me; in either case I shall be equally acquitted: if the Judges pronounce in my favour, you are condemned; if they pronounce for you, according to our agreement, I owe you nothing, for I lose my first cause." The Judges being unable to reconcile the pleaders, ordered them to reappear before the Court a hundred years afterwards.
ORIENTAL EXTRAVAGANCE.
Mr. Forbes has given a curious picture of the kind of magnificence affected by Asuf ul Dowlah, who succeeded his father on the throne of Oude. This nabob was fond of lavishing his treasures on gardens, palaces, horses, elephants, European guns, lustres, and mirrors. He expended annually about £200,000 in English manufactures. He had more than one hundred gardens, twenty palaces, one thousand two hundred elephants, three thousand fine saddle horses, one thousand five hundred double-barrel guns, seventeen hundred superb lustres, thirty thousand shades of various forms and colours; seven hundred large mirrors, girandoles and clocks. Some of the latter were very curious, richly set with jewels, having figures in continual movement, and playing tunes every hour; two of these clocks only, cost him thirty thousand pounds. Without taste or judgment, he was extremely solicitous to possess all that was elegant and rare; he had instruments and machines of every art and science, but he knew none; and his museum was so ridiculously arranged that a wooden cuckoo-clock was placed close to a superb timepiece which cost the price of a diadem; and a valuable landscape of Claude Lorraine suspended near a board painted with ducks and drakes. He sometimes gave a dinner to ten or twelve persons, sitting at their ease in a carriage drawn by elephants. His jewels amounted to about eight millions sterling. Amidst this precious treasure, he might be seen for several hours every day handling them as a child does his toys.
ANCIENT SCOTTISH CHIEFTAIN.