DAY after day we continued, like the mourners, to go about the streets, in the tangle of the bazaars, under the dark roofs, endeavoring to see Damascus. When we emerged from the city gate, the view was not much less limited. I made the circuit of the wall on the north, in lanes, by running streams, canals, enclosed gardens, seeing everywhere hundreds of patient, summer-loving men and women squatting on the brink of every rivulet, by every damp spot, in idle and perfect repose.

We stumbled about also on the south side of the town, and saw the reputed place of St. Paul's escape, which has been lately changed. It is a ruined Saracenic tower in the wall, under which is Bab Kisan, a gate that has been walled up for seven hundred years. The window does not any more exist from which the apostle was let down in a basket, but it used to be pointed out with confidence, and I am told that the basket is still shown, but we did not see it. There are still some houses on this south wall, and a few of them have projecting windows from which a person might easily be lowered. It was in such a house that the harlot of Jericho lived, who contrived the escape of the spies of Joshua. And we see how thick and substantial the town walls of that city must have been to support human habitations. But they were blown down.

Turning southward into the country, we came to the tomb of the porter who assisted Paul's escape, and who now sleeps here under the weight of the sobriquet of St. George. A little farther out on the same road is located the spot of Said's conversion.

Near it is the English cemetery, a small high-walled enclosure, containing a domed building surmounted by a cross; and in this historical spot, whose mutations of race, religion, and government would forbid the most superficial to construct for it any cast-iron scheme of growth or decay, amid these almost melancholy patches of vegetation which still hover in the Oriental imagination as the gardens of all delights, sleeps undisturbed by ambition or by criticism, having at last, let us hope, solved the theory of "averages," the brilliant Henry T. Buckle.

Not far off is the Christian cemetery. "Who is buried here?" I asked our thick-witted guide.

"O, anybody," he replied, cheerfully, "Greeks, French, Italians, anybody you like"; as if I could please myself by interring here any one I chose.

Among the graves was a group of women, hair dishevelled and garments loosened in the abandon of mourning, seated about a rough coffin open its entire length. In it lay the body of a young man who had been drowned, and recovered from the water after three days. The women lifted up his dead hands, let them drop heavily, and then wailed and howled, throwing themselves into attitudes of the most passionate grief. It was a piteous sight, there under the open sky, in the presence of an unsympathizing crowd of spectators.

Returning, we went round by the large Moslem cemetery, situated at the southwest corner of the city. It is, like all Moslem burying-grounds, a melancholy spectacle,—a mass of small whitewashed mounds of mud or brick, with an inscribed headstone,—but here rest some of the most famous men and women of Moslem history. Here is the grave of Ibn' As鈑er, the historian of Damascus; here rests the fierce Moawyeh, the founder of the dynasty of the Omeiyades; and here are buried three of the wives of Mohammed, and Fatimeh, his granddaughter, the child of Ali, whose place of sepulture no man knows. Upon nearly every tomb is a hollow for water, and in it is a sprig of myrtle, which is renewed every Friday by the women who come here to mourn and to gossip.

Much of the traveller's time, and perhaps the most enjoyable part of it, in Damascus, is spent in the bazaars, cheapening scarfs and rugs and the various silken products of Syrian and Persian looms, picking over dishes of antique coins, taking impressions of intaglios, hunting for curious amulets, and searching for the quaintest and most brilliant Saracenic tiles. The quest of the antique is always exciting, and the inexperienced is ever hopeful that he will find a gem of value in a heap of rubbish; this hope never abandons the most blase tourist, though in time he comes to understand that the sharp-nosed Jew, or the oily Armenian, or the respectable Turk, who spreads his delusive wares before him, knows quite as well as the Seeker the value of any bit of antiquity, not only in Damascus, but in Constantinople, Paris, and London, and is an adept in all the counterfeits and impositions of the Orient.

The bazaars of the antique, of old armor, ancient brasses, and of curiosities generally, and even of the silver and gold smiths, are disappointing after Cairo; they are generally full of rubbish from which the choice things seem to have been culled; indeed, the rage for antiquities is now so great that sharp buyers from Europe range all the Orient and leave little for the innocent and hopeful tourist, who is aghast at the prices demanded, and usually finds himself a victim of his own cleverness when he pays for any article only a fourth of the price at first asked.

The silk bazaars of Damascus still preserve, however, a sort of pre-eminence of opportunity, although they are largely supplied by the fabrics manufactured at Beyrout and in other Syrian towns. Certainly no place is more tempting than one of the silk khans,—gloomy old courts, in the galleries of which you find little apartments stuffed full of the seductions of Eastern looms. For myself, I confess to the fascination of those stuffs of brilliant dyes, shot with threads of gold and of silver. I know a tall, oily-tongued Armenian, who has a little chamber full of shelves, from which he takes down one rich scarf after another, unfolds it, shakes out its shining hues, and throws it on the heap, until the room is littered with gorgeous stuffs. He himself is clad in silk attire, he is tall, suave, insinuating, grave, and overwhelmingly condescending. I can see him now, when I question the value put upon a certain article which I hold in my hand and no doubt betray my admiration of in my eyes,—I can see him now throw back his head, half close his Eastern eyes, and exclaim, as if he had hot pudding in his mouth, "Thot is ther larster price."