lanterns from top to bottom. The mosque was a mass of light, and between
the tall minarets flanking it, burned the inscription, in Arabic
characters, "Long life to you, O our Sovereign!"

The discharge of a cannon announced the Sultan's departure from his
palace, and immediately the guns on the frigates and the batteries on both
shores took up the salute, till the grand echoes, filling the hollow
throat of the Golden Horn, crashed from side to side, striking the hills
of Scutari and the point of Chalcedon, and finally dying away among the
summits of the Princes' Islands, out on the Sea of Marmora. The hulls of
the frigates were now lighted up with intense chemical fires, and an
abundance of rockets were spouted from their decks. A large Drummond light
on Seraglio Point, and another at the Battery of Tophaneh, poured their
rival streams across the Golden Horn, revealing the thousands of caiques
jostling each other from shore to shore, and the endless variety of gay
costumes with which they were filled. The smoke of the cannon hanging in
the air, increased the effect of this illumination, and became a screen of
auroral brightness, through which the superb spectacle loomed with large
and unreal features. It was a picture of air--a phantasmagoric spectacle,
built of luminous vapor and meteoric fires, and hanging in the dark round
of space. In spite of ourselves, we became eager and excited, half fearing
that the whole pageant would dissolve the next moment, and leave no trace
behind.

Meanwhile, the cannon thundered from a dozen batteries, and the rockets
burst into glittering rain over our heads. Grander discharges I never
heard; the earth shook and trembled under the mighty bursts of sound, and
the reverberation which rattled along the hill of Galata, broken by the
scattered buildings into innumerable fragments of sound, resembled the
crash of a thousand falling houses. The distant echoes from Asia and the
islands in the sea filled up the pauses between the nearer peals, and we
seemed to be in the midst of some great naval engagement. But now the
caique of the Sultan is discerned, approaching from the Bosphorus. A
signal is given, and a sunrise of intense rosy and golden radiance
suddenly lights up the long arsenal and stately mosque of Tophaneh, plays
over the tall buildings on the hill of Pera, and falls with a fainter
lustre on the Genoese watch-tower that overlooks Galata. It is impossible
to describe the effect of th