and hardware retailers are also arranged with singular neatness. Every trade has its separate bazaar, or open stall, and all of them seem busy. There are booksellers and venders of paper, much of which is Russian, and of a blue colour. The month of May is the season of the 'falodeh,' which is a white jelly strained from wheat, and drunk with sherbet and snow. The people are very fond of it, and the shopkeepers in all parts of the town seem constantly at work with their customers. A pillar of snow stands on one side of them, and a fountain plays near it, which gives these places a cool and clean appearance. Around the bakers' shops crowds of people may be seen waiting for their bread. I observed that they baked it by plastering it to the sides of the oven. Cabool is famed for its kabobs, or cooked meat, which are in great request. Rhuwash' was the dainty of the May season in Cabool. It is merely blanched rhubarb, which is reared under a careful protection from the sun, and grows up rankly under the hills in the neighbourhood. Its flavour is delicious. 'Shabash rhuwash! bravo rhuwash!' is the cry in the streets; and every one buys it. In the most crowded parts of the city there are story-tellers amusing the idlers, or dervises proclaiming the glories and deeds of the prophets. If a baker makes his appearance before these worthies, they demand a cake in the name of some prophet; and, to judge by the number who follow their occupation, it must be a profitable one. There are no wheeled carriages in Cabool. The streets are not very narrow; they are kept in a good state during dry weather, and are intersected by small covered aqueducts of clean water, which is a great convenience to the people. We passed along them without observation, and even without an attendant. To me the appearance of the people was more novel than the bazaars. They sauntered about, dressed in sheepskin cloaks, and seemed huge from the quantity of clothes they wore. All the children have chubby red cheeks, which I at first took for an artificial colour, till I found it to be the gay bloom of youth. Cabool is a compactly built city, but its houses have no pretension to elegance. They are constructed of sun-dried bricks and wood, and few of them are more than two stories high. It is thickly peopled, and has a population of about sixty thousand souls. The river of Cabool passes through the city; and tradition says it has three times carried it away, or inundated it. In rain there is not a dirtier place than Cabool.”—Burnes's "Travels in the Bokhara,”

CHINESE DINNER.

THE first course was laid out in a great number of saucers of painted porcelain, and consisted of various relishes in a cold state, as salted earthworms, prepared and dried, but so cut up that fortunately I did not know what they were until I had swallowed them; salted and smoked fish, and ham, both of them cut into extremely small slices; besides which there was what they called Japan leather, a sort of a darkish skin, hard and tough, with a strong and far from agreeable taste, and which seemed to have been macerated some time in water. All the dishes, without exception, swam in soup. On one side figured pigeons' eggs, cooked in gravy, together with ducks and fowls cut very small, and immersed in a dark-coloured sauce; on the other, little balls made of sharks' fins, eggs, of which both the smell and taste seemed to us equally repulsive, immense grubs, a peculiar kind of sea-fish, crabs, and pounded shrimps.

As I was seated on the right hand of our host, I was the object of his whole attention; but nevertheless I found myself much at a loss how to use the chop-sticks, which were two little ivory sticks, tipped with silver; these, together with a knife that had a long, narrow, and thin blade, formed the whole of my eating apparatus. I had great difficulty in seizing my prey in the midst of these several bowls filled with gravy. In vain I tried to hold, in imitation of my host, this substitute for a fork between the thumb and the two first fingers of the right hand; for the chopsticks slipped aside every moment, leaving the little morsel which I coveted. It is true that the master of the house came to the relief of my inexperience (by which he was much entertained) with his two instruments, the extremities of which, a few moments before, had touched a mouth whence age and the use of snuff and tobacco had chased its good looks. I could very well have dispensed with such an auxiliary; for my stomach had already much ado to support the various ragouts, every one more surprising than another, which I had been obliged, whether I would or not, to taste. However, I contrived to eat with tolerable propriety a soup prepared with the famous birds' nests, in which the Chinese are such epicures. The substance thus served up is reduced into very fine filaments, transparent as isinglass, and resembling vermicelli, with little or no taste. At first I was much puzzled to find how, with our chop-sticks, we should be able to taste of the various soups which composed the greater part of the dinner,

and had already called to mind the fable of the ox and the stork, when our Chinese entertainers, dipping at once into the bowls with a little saucer, placed at the side of each guest, showed us how to get rid of the difficulty.

To the younger guests, naturally lively, such a crowd of novelties presented an inexhaustible fund of pleasantry, and though unintelligible to the worthy Hong merchant, the jokes did not seem to delight him a bit the less. The wine in the meanwhile circulated freely, and the toasts followed each other in rapid succession. This liquor, which to my taste was by no means agreeable, is always taken hot. We drank it in little gilt cups, having the shape of an antique vase, with two handles of perfect workmanship, and kept constantly filled by attendants holding large silver vessels like coffee-pots. The Chinese mode of pledging is singular enough, but has, at the same time, some little resemblance to the English. The person who wishes to do this courtesy to one or more guests gives them notice by an attendant; then, taking the full cup with both hands, he lifts it to the level of his mouth, and after making a comical sign with his head, he drinks off the contents; he waits till the other party has done the same, and finally repeats the nod of the head, holding the cup downwards before him to show it is quite empty.

After all these good things, of which it gave me pleasure to see the last, succeeded the second course, which was preceded by a little ceremony, of which the object seemed to me to be a trial of the guests' appetites. Upon the edges of four bowls, arranged in a square, three others are placed, filled with stews, and surmounted by an eighth, which thus forms the summit of a pyramid; and the custom is to touch none of these, although invited by the host. On the refusal of the party, the whole disappeared, and the table was covered with articles in pastry and sugar, in the midst of which was a salad composed of the tender shoots of the bamboo, and some watery preparations that exhaled a most disagreeable odour.

Up to this point the relishes of which I first spoke had been the sole accompaniments of all the successive ragouts. They still served to season the bowls of plain rice, which the attendants now for the first time placed before each of the guests. I regarded with an air of considerable embarrassment the two little sticks, with which, notwithstanding the experience acquired since the commencement of the repast, it seemed very doubtful whether I should be able to eat my rice grain by grain according to the belief of Europeans regarding the Chinese custom. I therefore

waited until my host should begin, to follow his example. The Chinese, cleverly joining the ends of their chop-sticks, plunged into the bowls of rice held up to the mouth, which was opened to its full extent, thus easily shovelled in the rice, not by grains, but by handfuls.

After the second course, which lasted a much shorter time than the first, the attendants cleared away everything. Presently the table was strewed with flowers, which vied with each other in brilliancy; pretty baskets, filled with the same, were mixed with plates which contained a vast variety of delicious sweetmeats as well as cakes, of which the forms were as ingenious as they were varied.

At length we adjourned to the next room to take tea, the indispensable commencement and close of all visits and ceremonies among the Chinese. According to custom, the servants presented it in porcelain cups, each of which was covered with a saucer-like top, which confines and prevents the aroma from evaporating. The boiling water has been poured over a few of the leaves collected at the bottom of the cup; and the infusion, to which no sugar is ever added in China, exhaled a delicious fragrant odour, of which the best teas carried to Europe can scarcely give an idea. LAPLACE.

NIGHT IN A TURKISH FAMILY.

As it does not fall to the lot of every traveller to pass the night in a Turkish family, you may be curious enough to know how we were entertained. We were shown into a large room with a divan or sofa continued all round the walls, and here we stretched ourselves. They brought us the usual entertainment of pipes and coffee, and after some time the Muzzelim's son and his uncle entered the room, and seated themselves on the divan opposite, and smoked their pipes without saying a word. After passing an hour in this silent way, preparations were made for supper. The young man stood up, took a cloth from a servant, and with a dexterous fling spread it in a circle on the floor; in the centre of this he placed a joint-stool, and on the stool a large metal tray. We were now motioned to approach, and having sat crosslegged on the floor round the stool, we drew the skirts of the cloth over our knees, while the servants brought embroidered napkins, and laid one on each of our shoulders. When all the company were seated, including our janissary, the first dish was

brought in and laid on the tray; round the edge of the tray were placed long slices of brown bread, with a horn spoon between each, so as to project over and form a complete border, and in the middle was set a large pewter basin of pea soup; having all dipped in our spoons and taken a few mouthfuls, it was removed, and immediately succeeded by another filled with sausages. Into this the Muzzelim's son dipped his hand, and we all followed his example. This was also removed, and replaced by one of youart, a kind of sour milk, with balls of forced meat floating in it; next succeeded balls of meat wrapped up in vine leaves, then mutton boiled to rags on homos, a kind of pea like a ram's head, which they are very fond of in this country; and lastly, a piloff, or dish of boiled rice, with which all Turkish entertainments conclude. A glass of pure water was handed round, of which we all drank, and then followed servants, with a ewer and basin, in which we washed. The whole apparatus was now removed, and we resumed our pipes and seats on the divan, having despatched our supper with such silent celerity, that the whole occupied but nine minutes and a half!

As we had brought apparatus with us, we now procured some hot water, and entertained our hosts with a cup of tea, which they had heard of, but never tasted. We sweetened a cup in the most approved manner with sugar, and softened it with milk, and then presented it. A Turk never takes anything of this kind but coffee, without milk or sugar, which is black, thick, and bitter as soot; when, therefore, he filled his mouth with the mawkish mixture we made for him, his distress was quite ridiculous. He would not swallow it, and he would not spit it out, for a Turk never spits out in company; so he kept it churning in his mouth till he could keep it no longer. He then made a pretext for going out, which he did as fast as a Turk can move, and got rid of it over the stairs. When he returned, however, he said the ladies of the harem requested to taste our tea also, so we sent them in a specimen; we heard them burst into loud fits of laughing at the extraordinary stuff, and we were informed they liked it as little as the men; we sent them, however, a present of dry tea to make after their own fashion of coffee. Our bed and bedchamber were the divan and room where we sat. DR. WALSH.

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