though gracious smile, 'to
friends we give only the sunny side.'

THE BOSPHORUS

THE stranger whose felicity it has been to float between the shores of
the Bosphorus will often glance back with mingled feelings of regret
and satisfaction to the memory of those magical waters. This splendid
strait, stretching from the harbour of Constantinople to the mouth
of the Euxine, may be about twenty miles in length, and its ordinary
breadth seldom exceeds one mile. The old Greek story tells that one
might hear the birds sing on the opposite shore. And thus two great
continents are divided by an ocean stream narrower than many rivers
that are the mere boundaries of kingdoms. Yet it is strange that the
character of these two famous divisions of our earth is nowhere more
marked than on the shores of the Bosphorus. The traveller turns without
disappointment from the gay and glittering shores of Europe to the
sublimer beauty and the dusky grandeur of Asia.

The European side, until you advance within four or five miles of
the Black Sea, is almost uninterruptedly studded with fanciful and
ornamental buildings: beautiful villages, and brilliant summer palaces,
and bright kiosks, painted in arabesque, and often gilt. The green
background to the scene is a sparkling screen of terraced gardens,
rising up a chain of hills whose graceful undulations are crowned with
groves of cypress and of chestnut, occasionally breaking into fair
and delicate valleys, richly wooded, and crossed by a grey and antique
aqueduct.

But in Asia the hills rise into mountains, and the groves swell into
forests. Everything denotes a vast, rich and prolific land, but there
is something classical, antique, and even mysterious in its general
appearance. An air of stillness and deep repose pervades its less
cultivated and less frequented shores; and the very eagles, as they
linger over the lofty peak of 'the Giant's grave,' seem conscious that
they are haunting some heroic burial-place.

I remember that one of the most strange, and even sublime, spectacles
that I ever beheld occurred to me one balmy autumnal eve as I returned
home in my caique from Terapia, a beautiful village on the Bosphorus,
where I had been passing the day, to Pera. I encountered an army of
dolphins, who were making their way from the AEgean and the Sea of
Marmora through the Strait to the Euxine. They stretched right across
the water, and I should calculate that they covered, with ver