My house was of perfectly new construction, well planted, and well situated, and proof against water, as well as wind. I had four rooms—a sitting-room, a dining-room, a bed-room, and a dressing-room. I had a walled inclosure of about eighty feet square, where roses and geraniums vied in beauty with jessamines and lilies. There was also a poultry-yard, a pigeon-house, stables for three horses, a store-house, a kitchen, and a servants' room. I had in the garden a grape-vine (muscatel), a pomegranate-tree, a peach-tree, a plum-tree, an apricot, and a China quince; and, in addition to all these, a fountain perpetually jetting up water, and a well, and a bathing-room. For all this accommodation, I paid three hundred and fifty piastres—about three pounds sterling—and this was a higher rent than would be paid by any native. Of course, the house was unfurnished, but furniture in the East is seldom on a grand scale: a divan, half a dozen chairs, a bedstead, a mattress, a looking-glass, a table or two, and half a dozen pipes, and narghilies are all one requires. Servants cost about three pounds a head per annum. Seven and a half pounds of good mutton may be had for a shilling. Fowls—and fat ones, too—twopence each. Fish is sold by the weight—thirteen rotolos for a beshlik, or about seventy pounds weight for a shilling. Eels—the very best flavored in the world—three halfpence each. As for vegetables, whether cabbages, lettuces, des asperges, celery, watercresses, parsley, beans, peas, radishes, turnips, carrots, cauliflowers, and onions, a pennyworth would last a man a week. Fruit is sold at the same rates; and grapes cost about five shillings the horse-load. Game is also abundant. Dried fruits and nuts can be obtained in winter. In fact, living as well as one could wish, I found it impossible—house-rent, servants, horses, board, washing, and wine included—to exceed the expenditure of forty pounds per annum.
Under these circumstances, it may appear marvelous that many Europeans, possessed of limited means, have not made Antioch their temporary home; but every question has two sides, and every thing its pros and cons. The cons, in this instance, are the barbarous character of the people among whom you live; the perpetual liability of becoming, at one instant's warning, the victim of some fanatical émeute; the small hopes you have of redress for the grossest insults offered; the continual intrigues entered into by the Ayans to disturb your peace and comfort; the absence of many of the luxuries enjoyed in Europe; the want of society and books, and the total absence of all places of worship, which gradually creates in the mind a morbid indifference to religion, and which feeling frequently degenerates into absolute infidelity. It is better to choose with David in such a case, and say, "I would rather be a door-keeper in the house of the Lord than dwell in the tents of iniquity."
AN ENGLISH PHILANTHROPIST IN THE EAST.
Two hours and a half ride from Antioch, through a country that is a perfect paradise upon earth, but over the most execrable and detestable: road, brought me to the ancient Seleucia. Famed in the olden history as the emporium of Eastern commerce and as a port unequaled for safe harborage, Suedia is celebrated in our own days as having been the residence and favorite retreat of the late John Barker, Esq., formerly her Majesty's Consul-general in Egypt, equally eminent as a philanthropist and a Christian gentleman.
Suedia, or, as it is termed by the Syrians, Zectoonli, embraces a wide range of mulberry gardens, extending over a space of ten miles by three, and containing a scattered and mixed population, equal, if not exceeding in number, to that of Antioch. The village is spread chiefly upon the banks of the Orontes, and running parallel with the beach, which forms a boundary to the waves of the Seleucian gulf where the Orontes ends her course, and nature has scattered around her choicest gifts.
It would require the pen of an inspired writer to describe in adequate colors this garden of Eden. Mulberry, lemon, and orange-trees form an uninterrupted succession of gardens, surrounding picturesque little cottages, each one eclipsing the other in neatness and beauty of situation. The peasants themselves are hale, robust, and sturdy-looking men; the children are rosy and healthy; and the women beautiful, innocent, and happy. Each stops, as a stranger passes, to make a bashful salute, and bid him welcome to their country. This is what I never met elsewhere; and it was very pleasing to find uncivilized and untaught Arabs so polite and courteous. There is, in fact, nothing that a native of Suedia will not do to render a sojourn among them agreeable and pleasant. They are a simple people, and as simple in their habits as in their character. The sun teaches them when to rise, and darkness when to seek their beds. They labor for subsistence; they sleep for refreshment; they laugh with the merry, and weep with the afflicted. Their simple old pastor, in their venerable rustic church, has pointed out to them from childhood how heinous is sin—how amiable virtue; and they are taught ever to remember that an all-seeing Eye will detect and punish sins hidden to men, as surely as public offenses will entail flagellation from the pasha and governors of the district. Thus they live happy in their innocence, and in each other, and almost void of offense toward God and man; a meet people to inhabit a country like that they dwell in.
To this quiet retreat, Mr. Barker, after zealously serving his king and country for a long period of years, retired, on quitting Egypt, to enjoy in seclusion the pension awarded him by the government, and devote the remainder of his days to the peaceful pursuit of agriculture. Few men could better appreciate the rich gifts Nature had lavished on this spot. A perfect botanist, and skilled in agriculture, his time and income during a period of nearly twenty years, were spent in promoting every improvement in the cultivation of the soil; and many have grown rich, directly or indirectly, from the methods of tillage introduced into the country by Mr. Barker.
On taking possession of his wife's landed inheritance, Mr. Barker's first steps were to erect an edifice becoming his means and station, and one that would render his sojourn in the country agreeable to himself and his family, and the many friends and strangers, who delighted in visiting him, remaining his guests for days, weeks, and, in some instances, months. There was no mistake as to the genuine hospitality of the worthy host. His word of welcome was truth itself; and the warm cordiality of his excellent heart was felt in the firm grasp of his hand. "Sir," he has said to me on more than one occasion, "it is the traveler who confers a favor upon me by remaining, and giving me the benefit of his society, provided he be a man that is at all sufferable. Some few, I must own, have staid longer than myself or my family could have wished, but they have been very few." A perfect gentleman, an accomplished scholar, a sagacious thinker, a philosopher, and philanthropist, people wondered how so great a heart could content itself to remain in a place like Suedia. I had the honor to be on intimate terms with him during my two years' residence in Suedia, and I learned to love and respect him so much, that when he died, full of years and honor, I felt a void in my heart, to which I still recur with the deepest regret.
Mr. Barker's main object in life was to confer benefits upon his suffering neighbors. He knew how much misery and wretchedness was to be every day met with in England, and how incompetent were his means, all-sufficient though they were for his own wants, to relieve such distress; but in Syria a more available field for benevolence presented itself. How far and how well his charitable disposition exerted itself may be imagined, when I say that out of more than six thousand inhabitants, there is not one who does not to this day bless the memory of the good man, who through so many years was the friend of all. I ought to add that through fifty years of uninterrupted intercourse with as many thousand people, he never made one enemy, but was universally respected and beloved.
The gardens of Mr. Barker have been long celebrated for the quantity, variety, and excellent quality of their fruit. In the piece of ground attached to his own private residence, I have plucked from the tree the guava, the sweet-kerneled apricot, the Stanwick nectarine (for which the Duke of Northumberland obtained for him a silver medal), the sweet-kerneled peach, the shucapara, the celebrated apricot of Damascus, the plaqueminia kaki, the loquot or nepolis japonica, the mandarin, and the Malta blood-orange; in short, the fruit of every country in the world. At Mr. Barker's request, I wrote to Penang and China for seeds of some rare fruits and spices, which Colonel Butterworth and Sir George Bonham had the kindness to send me; and though previously produced solely in those climes, they have since sprung up in these charming gardens. But, alas! they did not thus display themselves till the excellent old man had passed away. On the demise of Mr. Barker, the whole of his landed property reverted to his amiable and kind-hearted widow.