from the top; and one may walk for miles beneath the spacious
roofs. The shops exhibit all the stuffs of the East, especially of Persia
and India. There is also an extensive display of European fabrics, as the
eastern provinces of Asiatic Turkey, as far as Baghdad, are supplied
entirely from Aleppo and Trebizond.

Within ten years--in fact, since the Allied Powers drove Ibrahim Pasha
out of Syria--the trade of Aleppo has increased, at the expense of
Damascus. The tribes of the Desert, who were held in check during the
Egyptian occupancy, are now so unruly that much of the commerce between
the latter place and Baghdad goes northward to Mosul, and thence by a
safer road to this city. The khans, of which there are a great number,
built on a scale according with the former magnificence of Aleppo, are
nearly all filled, and Persian, Georgian, and Armenian merchants again
make their appearance in the bazaars. The principal manufactures carried
on are the making of shoes (which, indeed, is a prominent branch in every
Turkish city), and the weaving of silk and golden tissues. Two long
bazaars are entirely occupied with shoe-shops, and there is nearly a
quarter of a mile of confectionery, embracing more varieties than I ever
saw, or imagined possible. I saw yesterday the operation of weaving silk
and gold, which is a very slow process. The warp and the body of the woof
were of purple silk. The loom only differed from the old hand-looms in
general use in having some thirty or forty contrivances for lifting the
threads of the warp, so as to form, by variation, certain patterns. The
gold threads by which the pattern was worked were contained in twenty
small shuttles, thrust by hand under the different parcels of the warp, as
they were raised by a boy trained for that purpose, who sat on the top of
the loom. The fabric was very brilliant in its appearance, and sells, as
the weavers informed me, at 100 piastres per _pik_--about $7 per yard.

We had letters to Mr. Ford, an American Missionary established here, and
Signor di Picciotto, who acts as American Vice-Consul. Both gentlemen have
been very cordial in their offers of service, and by their aid we have
been enabled to see something of Aleppo life and society. Mr. Ford, who
has been here four years, has a pleasant residence at Jedaida, a Christian
suburb of the city. His congregation numbers some fifty or sixty
proselytes, who are mostly from the schismatic sects of the Armenians.