as pall-bearers, in their black cloaks and hoods; after them the lady volunteers; and lastly, the doctors, surgeons, commissariat and other officers, followed by Dr. Meyer and General Storks. It was a sad and striking scene, to witness this train slowly winding through the long narrow streets of Smyrna; while groups of Franks, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, and Jews, stood looking on, but all in silence and with apparent respect, some (not the Turks, of course) even taking off their hats as we passed. A year ago such a scene would not have been permitted to proceed unmolested.

was so obliging and anxious to be of use.
She was a good-looking young woman,
and immediately on her arrival had be-
come the object of attraction to one of
the purveyor's clerks, whose attentions
she, however, most steadily declined. He
still persisted in showing the most extra-
ordinary attachment to her; and during
her illness was in such a state of excite-
ment and distress, as to be utterly incapa-
citated to attend to his duties properly.
He used to sit on the stairs leading to her
room, in the hopes of seeing some one who
could tell him how she was, and went per-
petually to the passage outside her room,
entreating of the Misses Le M- -, who
generally sat up with her, to let him in to
see her: this they refused till the night of
her death, when she was quite insensible
and past all hope of recovery; so that his
visit could do her no harm. He stayed a
few minutes, and looked his last on her;
for in the morning, at seven o'clock, she
died. I never shall forget his face when
he came to my store-room, in accordance
with his duty, to correct some inaccuracy
in the diet-roll. He seemed utterly be-
wildered with sorrow; and Miss S-
who had also occasion to speak to him,
said she never saw grief so strongly mark-
ed in a human face. He insisted on fol-
lowing her remains to the grave, as chief
mourner, and wearied himself carrying the
coffin. No one interfered with him; for
all seemed to think he had acquired the
right, by his unmistakable affection, to
perform these sad offices; and the lady
superintendent, moved by his sorrow,
allowed him to retain a ring of some small
value, which she had been accustomed to

The Protestant burial-ground is a dismal-looking, neglected spot. It was chosen from an idea that Drusilla's friends at home might prefer it to the open hill where the soldiers lay; but, if there had been time for consideration and inspection, it would have been otherwise arranged; for the appearance of the place struck a chill to our hearts-it looked so "dank and dreary," with the grass more than a foot high, and the weeds towering above it; and either from its being close to the bay, and the porous nature of the soil, or from some other cause not ascertained by me, the grave, which had been dug in the forenoon, was almost filled with water; and on the words, "Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God," we heard the coffin splash, with a dismal sound, into the more than half-full grave. There was a general regret, afterwards, that this burial-ground had been chosen, though it was with the best intention that the error had been committed; but poor Drusilla will not sleep the less soundly! And we all agreed, on leaving her grave, that who-wear." ever of us was next called to die, should be buried on the hill, in the spot allotted to the poor soldiers, open and unprotected as it was. Death seemed very near to us then; we had already lost two orderlies, and many of the nurses were lying at the gates of death. Miss A-- had made an almost miraculous escape, and was not yet out of danger from relapse. The first gap had been made in our immediate party; and who could tell whether she might not be the next?

The evening was closing fast as we returned, some in caïques, and others walking, solemnly and sadly; for besides the feeling naturally attending such a scene, we all regretted poor Drusilla, who, although she had not been long among us,

Fever, which appeared in almost every ward, was indeed most deadly and severe. D, a soldier of the 34th, who had been acting as orderly (and who, I heard, had been a most hard-working and attentive one), suddenly sickened, and his case very rapidly assumed the worst form. He had been seized in the orderlies' room, and for a day remained there; but was afterwards removed to one of my wards, on the basement-floor. I never saw any one so suddenly and utterly prostrated; it seemed almost hopeless to attempt to do anything for him; and so, I suspect, the surgeon thought; for, giving general instructions, he left me to do pretty much as I pleased. I remember so well what an intense desire possessed me to prolong

at all events, it is venerated as his grave | yard. A lady told me a story of a man, by Greeks, Roman Catholics, Armenians, M- -, in her division, which shows how and Protestants, and many a twig is torn much some of them will venture for a away from the good old cypress as a memen- smoke. He had just had one of his toes to of the "Tomb of Polycarp." Strange taken off under the influence of chloroform. that it should also be a spot consider- It bled profusely; and the surgeon, after ed sacred by the Turks! A light is kept binding it up, went away, giving her burning there all night, its faint glimmer strict injunctions not to allow him to marking the martyr's resting-place to those move, and ordered him some medicine, in the vessels resting in the Bay of Smyrna. which he would send presently. She was This cypress, too, is the sacrificial tree; its called away to another patient for a few roots have been watered by the blood of minutes, and went, leaving M- with many a victim; and when I was last strict orders not to put his foot down. there, in the middle of November, it had On her return to his bedside, to her asevidently been used the night before, as tonishment, he was gone; and after some its trunk was all sprinkled with blood. searching she discovered him, by the My friend and I had a Jewish servant traces of blood on the stairs and corridor, with us, but to him the spot had no tale sitting down in the yard, smoking his to tell; he plucked me a sprig of cypress, pipe with the greatest sang froid. She and gave it to me with an apathetic air of spoke to him seriously about disobeying pity and contempt. orders and doing himself an injury; but he was perfectly callous on the subject of his toe. She succeeded, however, in working on his feelings at having disfigured the corridor with blood; and he came back, saying: "Indeed, ma'am, I could not help going to have a pipe, for that was the nastiest stuff I ever got drunk on in my life"-alluding to the taste of the chloroform.

SOLDIERS' LOVE OF TOBACCO.

At first, with a very few exceptions, smoking was forbidden in the wards and corridors. This was felt to be a dreadful privation by those who could not get out of bed, or who were not allowed to go down-stairs to the basement corridor or

HEINRICH HEINE'S OPINION OF LON- | Social harmony will be suddenly revealed DON. I have seen the greatest wonder to him; he will hear the pulse of the world which the world can show to the astonish-beat audibly, and see it visibly-for, if ed spirit: I have seen it, and am still astonished-and still there remains fixed in my memory the stone forest of houses, and amid them the rushing stream of faces of living men, with all their motley passions, all their terrible impulses of love, hunger and hatred-I mean London. Send a philosopher to London, but for your life, no poet! Send a philosopher there, and stand him at the corner of Cheapside, where he will learn more than from all the books of the last Leipsic Fair; and as the billows of human life roar around him, so will a sea of new thoughts rise before him, and the Eternal Spirit which moves upon the face of the waters will breathe upon him; the most hidden secrets of

London is the right hand of the worldits active, mighty right hand-then we may regard the route which leads from the Exchange to Downing-street as the world's pyloric artery. But never send a poet to London! This downright earnestness of all things, the colossal uniformity, this machine-like movement, this troubled spirit in pleasure itself, this exaggerated London, smothers the imagination and rends the heart. And should you ever send a German poet thither-a dreamer, who stares at everything, even a ragged beggar woman, or the shining wares of a goldsmith's shop-why, then, at least, he will find things going right badly with him.

From Bentley's Miscellany.

LETTER-WRITING AND LETTER-WRITERS.

former of these necessities is implied, we are reminded, the discovery of a light and pliant material for receiving the character, for the rounded or cursive form of letters is closely dependent on the possession of a substance that yields to a rapid motion of the hand. The discovery of paper (whatever may have been the matter of which it was composed) was a great epoch in the

vellous "easement" to the "absent lover" and the anxious friend.

The

TATIAN and Clemens Alexandrinus as- | cribe the invention of letter-writing to a lady, a royal lady, the Persian Empress Atossa. Bentley lays stress upon this circumstance, in his examination of the Letters of Phalaris, the assumed right of Atossa being his final argument against the genuineness of the Sicilian epistles; for Phalaris lived an age or so before Atossa. It has been said with truth that the his-history of letter-writing, and was a martory of letter-writing might be taken as one mode of illustrating the history of mankind, and that a surer test of the progress of civilization could hardly be selected than the greater or less development of this useful art-for art it is. "The desire to communicate with distant friends must have arisen with the first separation of families; and occasional attempts to effect some correspondence must have been made before the invention either of alphabets or of regular roads." As for the times of Phalaris or Atossa, every person, as De Quincey observes, (in his review of Bentley and the Phalaris feud,) who considers the general characteristics of those times, must be satisfied that, if the epistolary form of composition then existed at all, it was merely as a rare agent in sudden and difficult emergencies "rarer perhaps by a great deal, than the use [this was written in 1830-tempora mutantur!] of telegraphic dispatches at present." As a species of literary composition, he maintains, it could not possibly arise until its use in matters of business had familiarized it to all the world: letters of grace and sentiment would be a remote afterthought upon letters of necessity and practical negotiation.

The frequency with which kinsfolk and friends could correspond, and the length at which they might correspond, would depend, as a reviewer of Roberts' History of Letter-Writing shows, upon a twofold condition: first, the possession of a facile and manageable alphabet; and secondly, of some tolerable roads, with habitations at accessible distances along them. In the

"As long, however, as the means of transit continued uncertain and irregular, there was no temptation to writing for trivial purposes; and letters forwarded by special courier would inevitably be confined to important communications. establishment of regular posts must have early followed that of extended empires, when military necessities could not fail to turn attention to the means of constant communication with outlying provinces and distant armies." This, it is allowed, may even have existed prior to the invention of alphabets; for not only might verbal communications be thus kept up, but many conventional symbols, less precise than letters, but still sufficiently indicative, might be sent along an established line.

As examples, we are referred to that earliest specimen of "Illustrated News"the drawings which the Peruvian Government received, of the Spaniards, their ships, and arms, immediately on the arrival of those invaders at the coast. The quipu was another symbolical instrument; it is described by Prescott as a cord about two feet long, composed of different colored threads tightly twisted together, from which a quantity of smaller threads were suspended in the manner of a fringe: the threads were vari-colored and knotted: the colors denoted sensible objects. Thus white represented silver, and yellow was the symbol of gold. But abstract ideas as well as sensible objects were thus represented-white also signifying peace, and red being the appropriate symbol of war.

written tears, and now of eager and expansive joys; now to

'Waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole,'

and now to echo a compliment, or circulate a sneer; now to convey the gall of malice, and now to reflect the

'Bloom of young desire and purple light of love;'

now to popularize the cogitations of the philosopher, and now to creak and tremble under the awful burdens of the in

The quipus, however, were chiefly used,
says Mr. Prescott, "for arithmetical pur-
poses. The knots served instead of ci-
phers, and could be combined in such a
manner as to represent numbers to any
amount they required. By means of these
they went through their calculations with
great rapidity, and the Spaniards who
visited the country bear testimony to
their accuracy." Under the title of quipu-
camayus, or Keepers of the Quipus, offi-
cers were distributed through the king-
dom, whose duty it was to keep the gov-
ernment well supplied with secret notes,
and official intelligence, ordinary and ex-spired apostle.
traordinary. Then again the poppy-heads
of Tarquin have been mentioned, as yet
ruder but not less significant expressions
of a sentiment. Particular signs, pre-
viously agreed on, would supply much
"military intelligence, without risk of its
being intelligible if betrayed by the for-
tune of war, or the messenger, to the enemy.
In early Greece, such a sign was the astraga-
lus, which was broken in twain, and divided
by host and guest at parting, as a token
between them for the renewal of recipro-
cal hospitality personally (and probably
by their recommendees)." It is suggest-
ed, too, as a further probability, that even
after the use of alphabets, a symbology,
answering the purpose of a cipher, was in
request for military correspondence;
though such resources, after all, are ex-
cessively limited in their applicability, so
that the invention of alphabetic writing
must have preceded anything approach
ing to an extensive interchange of

ideas.

A living essayist is magniloquent, and dulciloquent, about the beauty of the first idea of extracting the private passages of one's life; recording, rolling up, sealing down into compact unity, as he expresses it, and sending off by trusty transmission, little fragments of one's soul; of circulating the tinier griefs and fainter joys and more evanescent emotions, as well as the larger accidents and deeper passions of existence; of adding wings to conversation, and, by the soft, soundless touch of a paper-wand, and the wave of a rod of feather, annihilating time and space, truly a "delicate thought, and softly bodied forth;" of the motley freightage which this little ark, once launched, has been compelled to bear; now called on to transmit a weight of

The sentimental is, chronologically, a sequence upon the state letter. The bill of sale comes before the billet-doux. The art of letter-writing, indeed, like all other arts, must have been the result, says the retrospective reviewer previously quoted, of use and practice. "An interchange of state letters must have had its conventional style; and the epistolary treatises of literary correspondents could not but have all the stiffness and formality of professional writing. It was not till trifles came to be discussed, that the easy, graceful, unornamented, but beautiful simplicity of true letter-writing could have found an existence." Cicero is, in fact, held by this critic to have been the first Roman who habitually corresponded in any frequency with his friends, and the first to have reduced the practice to form and elegance. "In the stiff and awkward letters of our own ancestors, with their long-winded directions, and more longwinded compliments, we have a vivid picture of the difficulty with which the practice of letter-writing is accomplished by the unfrequent correspondent. There is not, perhaps, a more curious phenomenon in literature, than the graceful facility of Madame de Sévigné, whose contempora ries, whether nobles or pedants, were such pompous letter-writers."

The Pseudo-Phalaris correspondence has never recovered Bentley's swashing blow, though historians of letter-writing still begin their résumés of the art with that artful forgery. That series of letters commands the interest due to fabrications, and no more. Curious enough was the character of the feud which raged on the subejet a century and a half ago, when Sir Wiliam Temple, an aged statesman, and, as De Quincey describes him, prac