in the intervals appear the Bedouin's hut plastered with cow-dung, and the well-smoked tents of the Zingari or gypsy tribes. If the outward appearance of these dwellings be unprepossessing, their interior is repulsive beyond conception. The streets are irregular and filthy, and the mass of vegetable and impure matter collected in them, well adapted to breed pestilence in its most direful form. In perfect keeping with this is the appearance of the native Mussulmen themselves who form the great majority of the population—a poor impoverished race, sunk into the basest slothfulness, ill-fed, worse clad, and, possibly from the great scarcity of water, literally unacquainted with ablution; and even in those cases rendered indispensable by the injunctions of the Koran, such as washing the hands and feet before praying, and before and after meals, sand is substituted for water.

The surrounding country, though anything but fertile, yields abundant supplies of grain, the greater portion of which is either transported by camels to Jaffa, or shipped at Gaza itself, for Algiers and other ports of the Mediterranean. The whole

of the grain produced, is the property of a few of the wealthier ayans or Turkish nobles; who after

laying by a sufficiency for their own household wants, sell the remainder of their crops to merchants, who warehouse some portion of it for the consumption of the town itself, and the rest is disposed of to speculators; but so indolent and impoverished is the greater mass of the population, that whole families of them exist entirely for eight months in the year upon the fruit of the prickly pear, which in Gaza attains a perfection unrivalled even in India. The Arabs call the prickly pear saboor, which also signifies ballast and the name is singularly applicable in this instance. Many a morning, strolling in the environs of Gaza, I have wondered to see the complacent air with which an Arab and his family, decidedly in distressed circumstances, would squat themselves under the shade of a prickly pear hedge—and each furnished with a stick having a crook at the end, set earnestly to work gathering the ripe fruit, and pealing them in such a scientific manner as could only be accomplished by long experience. They were in fact ballasting themselves for the day, and had evidently nothing better in expectation. During the winter months, these poor creatures subsist on marshmallows and many edible herbs

and grasses unknown even to cattle. These they boil down into a pulp, which being seasoned with pepper and salt, and perhaps an onion, they render palatable, and it answers the same end as the saboor. Owing to these facilities in supporting life by the spontaneous produce of the soil, I never saw a man begging. The mildness of the winter also in a great measure accounts for this, they have no fear of frost before their eyes, no bitter biting cold to dispirit them, no forethought for those two indispensable requisites in colder climes, fuel and clothing.

Were Gaza built in a more compact manner, were its streets even as clean as those of Beyrout or Damascus (neither of which are very creditable on this score), such is the nature of its position, so pure the breezes that are wafted over it from seaward during the summer months, so balmy the desert winds that blow during the winter, that there is little doubt it would become the healthiest settlement in Syria or Palestine, after Latachia and Antioch; indeed, in Palestine there is no town that could compete with it. Olive-trees are plentiful in the neighbourhood of Gaza, and oliveoil proportionably cheap. A small quantity of

cotton and sessame seed is also grown, but the staple article of trade is soap, which is exported in large quantities to Egypt. The population is estimated at about fifteen thousand souls, principally composed of runaway Egyptians and Copts. Daily caravans arrive at Gaza from Egypt, consisting of whole villages migrating from the grinding sway of the Viceroy to place themselves under the milder despotism of the Turks. The Greeks are about fifteen hundred in number, the Armenians are very few, and there are no Jews; a remarkable fact considering the proximity of Gaza to Jerusalem, and one which says little for the commerce of a town.

Gaza is the least fanatical town I ever visited in Turkey; they allowed me freely to enter the mosques even with my shoes on. One of these structures had been in by-gone days a Christian Church, and a cross hewn out of the centre of the cieling, which was exceedingly lofty, had baffled all the efforts of the Turks to erase it

a fact which drove a few of the more intolerant to the verge of insanity. The Turks and their Christian neighbours agree remarkably well; they seldom or never dispute, and the insults and injuries

generally heaped upon Christians by Moslems are rarely heard of here. The Mosques, the pretended site of the city-gates, the spot where Sampson drew destruction upon himself and his enemies, and even Delilah's grave are assiduously pointed out by the native guides of the town. But the bee which sipped sweetness from flowers to lay up its hoard in so unseemly a hive as the lion's carcase-the rose that gave its dew-distilled nectar to zephyrs that came to announce the dawn these have long ceased to exist. The very lion has forsaken his haunt, and the fox burrows no more midst waving corn-fields.

I saw two things at Gaza that made me wonder exceedingly. One was a camel eating prickly pear-leaves, biting off and crunching, as though they were cucumbers, direful-looking leaves a foot long and two inches thick covered with thorns as big as spike-nails; the other was the incredibly large flight of doves that came across the sea about the latter end of August. Quails I had often seen in flights, but doves never. These birds arrived in such an exhausted state, that they alighted by thousands on the beach, and there fell an easy prey to the natives. Twenty sold for