,
confidential boughs, made for the talks of lovers and the meditations of
poets. Here we stopped to breakfast, but there was nothing for the poor
beasts to eat, and they waited for us droopingly, with their heads thrust
together. While we sat there three camels descended to the stream, and
after them a guard with a long gun. He was a well-made man, with a brown
face, keen, black eye, and piratical air, and would have made a good hero
of modern romance. Higher up we came to a guard house, on a little cleared
space, surrounded by beech forests. It was a rough stone hut, with a white
flag planted on a pole before it, and a miniature water-wheel, running a
miniature saw at a most destructive rate, beside the door.

Continuing our way, we entered on a region such as I had no idea could be
found in Asia. The mountains, from the bottoms of the gorges to their
topmost summits, were covered with the most superb forests of beech I ever
saw--masses of impenetrable foliage, of the most brilliant green, touched
here and there by the darker top of a pine. Our road was through a deep,
dark shade, and on either side, up and down, we saw but a cool, shadowy
solitude, sprinkled with dots of emerald light, and redolent with the odor
of damp earth, moss, and dead leaves. It was a forest, the counterpart of
which could only be found in America--such primeval magnitude of growth,
such wild luxuriance, such complete solitude and silence! Through the
shafts of the pines we had caught glorious glimpses of the blue mountain
world below us; but now the beech folded us in its arms, and whispered in
our ears the legends of our Northern home. There, on the ridges of the
Mysian Olympus, sacred to the bright gods of Grecian song, I found the
inspiration of our darker and colder clime and age. "_O gloriosi spiriti
degli boschi!_"

I could scarcely contain myself, from surprise and joy. Francois failed to
find French adjectives sufficient for his admiration, and even our
cheating katurgees were touched by the spirit of the scene. On either
side, whenever a glimpse could be had through the boughs, we looked upon
leaning walls of trees, whose tall, rounded tops basked in the sunshine,
while their bases were wrapped in the shadows cast by themselves. Thus,
folded over each other like scales, or feathers on a falcon's wing, they
clad the mountain. The trees were taller, and had a darker and more glossy
leaf than the American beech. By and by patches of blu