tly refreshed by his night's rest, and once more refreshing the
inner man with meats and such coffee as one gets only in Turkey, he
roamed again into the streets, where we must leave him to pursue his
purpose, be it what it might, while we turn to other scenes in our
story, taking the reader across the sea, to another, but no less
interesting land.

CHAPTER IV.

VALES OF CIRCASSIA.

Circassia, the land of beauty and oppression, whose noble valleys
produce such miracles of female loveliness, and whose level plains
are the vivid scenes of such terrible struggles; where a brave,
unconquerable peasantry have, for a very long period, defied the
combined powers of the whole of Russia, and whose daughters, though
the children of such brave sires, are yet taught and reared from
childhood to look forward to a life of slavery in a Turkish harem as
the height of their ambition--Circassia, the land of bravery, beauty
and romance, is one of the least known, but most interesting spots
in all Europe.

Whether it be that the genial air of its hills and vales possesses
power to beautify the forms and faces of its daughters, or that they
inherit those charms from their ancestors by right of blood, we may
not say; but from the farthest dates, it has ever supplied the
Sultan and his people with the lovely beings who have rendered of
the harems of the Mussulmen so celebrated for the charms they
enshrine. Its daughters have been the mothers of the highest
dignitaries of the courts, and Sultan Mahomet himself was born of a
Circassian mother.

Unendowed with mental culture, Providence has seemed, in a degree,
to compensate to the girls of Circassia for want of intellectual
brilliancy, by rendering them physically beautiful almost beyond
description. No wonder, then, educated, or rather uneducated as they
are, that the visions of their childhood, the dreams of their
girlish days, and even the aspirations of their riper years, should
be in the anticipation of a life of independence, luxury and love,
in those fairy-like homes that skirt the Bosphorus at Constantinople.

Being from their earliest childhood taught by their parents to look
upon this destiny as an enviable one, these fair girls do not fail
to appreciate and fully realize the captivating charms that Heaven
has so liberally endowed them with, and wait with trembling breasts
and hopeful hearts for the period when they shall change the humble
scenes of their existence, f