Their flocks consist of goats and sheep. | bacco or fractions of a penny, known as The goats are of several descriptions and metallics, to those who professed to be \various colors some with long, twisted able to guide us to such things. They horns, some without; some with the long, generally chose the tobacco, and terrible flowing, silken hair of the Angora, others walks they would take me at times; their with short, stubbly growth; but the sheep hour generally grew into two or three, or are all of that quaint Oriental description sometimes four. Now and again my la which one sees depicted on the bas-relief bors were rewarded with success, and a of Persepolis, with such enormous tails of further item was added to the history of fat that cases are on record of shepherds the pirates; but as often as not their exproviding tiny wooden carts for the sheep peditions ended in some miserable fiasco, to carry its appendage on. I have fre- fatigue, and loss of temper. A rock with quently seen sheep quite weighed down by natural marks upon it was supposed to be them, but I have only heard of and never an inscription. A cave, supported by a actually set eyes on the cart. These sheep natural pillar, was in their idea a ruin of are mentioned by Moses in Leviticus, and exceeding importance. Tombs of a recent by Herodotus, who tells us that the tails date were the frequent cause of acute diswere "one cubit in width." This weighty appointment. But notwithstanding the "bustle" is usually about the size of an many failures, each walk had a charm of ordinary football, and consists of a mass its own amongst the gorges, the rocks, of fat on each side of the sheep's spinal and the brushwood of rugged Cilicia; and cord, and forms, as we discovered, a most each walk increased my admiration for the excellent substitute for dripping, and far instinct for locality possessed by these preferable for cooking purposes to the nomads, who could thread their way with rancid butter the nomads provided us with. unerring steps through this mazy labyMost tribes of Yourouks on the south-rinth. ern slopes of the Taurus go in largely for camel-breeding. The stunted brushwood amongst which they live is excellent pasturage for them. They produce here that sort of mule camel known in Asia Minor as the Toulou camel, -a cross between the Syrian and the Bactrian, excellent for standing heat and cold, mountain or plain. Every encampment we visited had a number of camels, - tiny foals a few hours old, and broken-down old camels which had carried for many seasons the Yourouk tents up into the mountains. A camel, we learnt, has a great fancy for tobacco, and will often stretch its long neck around to receive a whiff from its owner's cigarette or pipe. As for the Yourouks themselves, they will do anything for tobacco and coffee, smoking the dried leaves of certain mountain herbs they know of when they cannot get the genuine article; and for coffee, too, they have an excellent substitute, slightly medicinal, and more aromatic in flavor, which they produce from the seed of a sort of thistle which grows abundantly on their mountains (Gundelia Tournefortia). Coffee and tobacco are often more serviceable to the traveller to have with him than money when amongst the nomads, for everything is done over coffee. Whenever we wapted to ascertain the whereabouts of ruins or inscriptions, Captain Achmed would summon the men of the tribe to a solemn cup of coffee and a conclave. Then he would offer either to In their home life the Yourouks have their peculiarities. They are the least religious people I ever came across, though professing to be followers of Mohammed. They have no mosques, nor did I see them saying the prayers or performing the ablutions inculcated by the Koran more than once or twice during the months we spent amongst them. They have their children circumcized, for the fact was forcibly brought before our notice one day during our stay at Maidan, when the trav elling operator appeared to initiate the young Yourouks into the first mysteries of their religion, and the greensward before the tent of the aga, or chief man, was chosen for the ceremony, and the children from all the neighboring tents were here assembled for treatment. Beyond this outward symbol there appears to be but little of the religious zeal common in Mohammedan communities, and the Turkish officials are constantly urging them to have mosques in certain spots, and to employ hodjas to instruct their children. But they will have none of these things. In one settlement we visited, high up in the mountains, a pious Mussulman had built them a mosque, but its roof was off, and I should think no service had been performed there for many years. Nevertheless, it is perhaps too sweeping an accusation to say that there is no religion amongst them. A Yourouk of the mountain has his sacred tree, specimens of which we frequently came across all occupy the same tent, nor even the same encampment, but are scattered hither and thither with varied occupations. One wife minds the camels, two or three look after the flocks in different pasturages; a wife to spin and a wife to weave, a wife to cook and a wife to hew wood and draw water, completes the probable sum total of a Yourouk's harem; and as hired labor is unknown amongst them, the multiplication of family ties is absolutely necessary for advance in life. A poorly clad Yourouk was very glad to earn a few coppers by acting as our guide when we were encamped at a spot called Jambeslii, amid the ruined fortresses of a pirate town built on the edge of a gorge. He was said to be very low indeed in the scale of human in wild, remote spots. Rags are hung to them, and wooden spoons as votive offerings. Little piles of stones are heaped up by passers-by in the vicinity, and when a person dies they bring the corpse to one of these trees, read a few verses of the Koran over it, and take a handful of the small stones to put upon the grave; and furthermore, the idea is current amongst them that a corpse should be buried near a pathway, that the passers-by may pray for its welfare. Religion in a modified form is present with them, and the religion of honesty and the respect for the good of others is far more present with them than it is amongst the Orientals who inhabit the towns and haunts of men. A verbal contract made over a cup of coffee is as binding to them as a written one, and the|ity; and on inquiring, I found that he was biggest rogues in the Levant are those to whom this primitive verbal contract has lost its value those who are, so to speak, in the transition stage between patriarchal simplicity and the laws of civilization. only able to keep three wives, and I could see that the Yourouks estimate the social position of their neighbors, much as we do in England, by the number of servants they are able to keep. One of the most intelligent Yourouks Womanhood is, as a natural result of we came across was called Osman. He this system, sunk very low amongst them. knew something of letters, and could dis- A woman in her red petticoats, open tinguish them from marks on the rocks, so jacket, and untidy head, is condemned to that he never took me wild-goose chases rush bare-legged after the goats, amid whilst we were in his district. He had a stones and brambles. Her only ornaments pleasing, round face, like all his race, but are cowrie-beads and brass bracelets; and far more intelligent. His long white pet- the surprise evinced at seeing their wrinticoats, blue jacket, and red fez made him kled faces in the looking-glass proved that decidedly picturesque, though perhaps the sin of vanity is unknown amongst not so strikingly so as some of his fellows them. When at the well fetching water, who indulged in yellow cotton and red or at the stream thumping their clothes girdles. He gave me a good deal of in-between stones to get them clean, they formation on the religious question, and spoke of the desire the government had to centralize the nomads, and induce those with families to reside, for some months of the year at any rate, where some instruc tion could be got for their young. "But," said he, "the spirit of roving freedom is innate in us; we could never conform to any other mode of life." And I could fancy that the nomad races of Asia Minor, like the Indians of America, if brought into immediate and forcible contact with the sedentary habits of the civilized, would dwindle away and become extinct. appear to have hardly anything on, and they are not ashamed; poor, hounded things, they have no cause for shame. Anything like immorality is unknown amongst them. We saw one or two betrothals and marriages whilst among them. At the betrothal the husband-elect generally agrees on the sum which he can pay for his future bride. In fact, the betrothal is the purchase of a slave pure and simple. When all arrangements are made, some one plays a tambourine or a flute, guns are let off, and the engaged couple exchange handkerchiefs. The marriage ceremony is a trifle gayer. Men go round with the bridegroom on horse or camel back to the tents in the neighborhood three or four times before the day of the wedding, and feasting and dancing are indulged in in the evenings. Generally on the fourth day the bride is brought to her husband's tent, he entertains his guests with coffee and food, and the ceremony is concluded. But these oft-repeated weddings lose their zest, and a man with a prospect of so much matrimony before him cannot afford the time and money generally devoted to such occasions by a European monogamist. Wife-stealing is common amongst the nomad tribes; though in excess of the male population, the supply of females is not equal to the demand, and constant skirmishes occur with neighboring tribes when a girl, or not unfrequently a matron, is snatched from her home. It is fortunate that infant mortality is not even greater, considering the little attention that Yourouk mothers pay to their offspring when they get beyond the age of swaddling; and even then, to our minds, the treatment of infant life is odd. The mother heats some fine earth with a hot stone from her fire; this she binds with the swaddling-bands tightly round the child, and it is dressed for the day. Either it hangs from its mother's back or it swings in a goat-skin attached to a rope from the tent-pole, or as often as not is left to roll in the mud. If the babe survives this stage and the next, when it runs about barefoot in the mud and cold, it grows up strong and healthy, and every Yourouk may be said to be an example of the survival of the fittest. They are a fine, hardy race, capable of the most wonderful feats of endurance. In times of famine they can subsist on bread made of acorns bitter, and with next to no nutriment in it. In times of plenty they eat little else but their flabby oat-cake, washed down with butter-milk. Sometimes, as a great luxury, the housewife boils in a huge caldron the cones of a species of juniper (Juniperus drupacea), which, with a little flour in it, produces a brown sweet, not unlike chocolate-cream in taste and consistency, and exceedingly satisfying. They also consume a great deal of a coarse, pungent cheese, and they are cunning in selecting food amongst the herbs on their mountains. But meat they seldom touch, nor wine, nor any of those many things which spoil our sedentary digestions. During our stay in their tents and hovels we were able to form a fair idea of what their intercourse is with the outer world. A well-to-do man, usually a Greek from one of the neighboring towns, will provide a tribe of Yourouks with a flock by what is called an "immortal contract"—that is to say, the Greek engages to keep up the number of animals in case famine or disease diminish them. The Yourouk on his side agrees to produce for his patron so much butter, cheese, and milk. The con tract is always a verbal one, and instances of cheating, I am told, are very rare; and if the seasons are prosperous, the tribe often succeeds in paying off the lender, and the flocks become their own. Periodically a travelling tinker comes amongst them, the great newsmonger of the mountain. He chooses a central spot to pitch his tent, and the most wonderful collection of decrepit copper utensils is soon brought from the neighboring tents and piled around. He usually brings with him a young assistant to look after the mule and blow the bellows; and with nitre heated at his fire he mends the damaged articles, gossiping the while, and filling the minds of the simple Yourouks who stand around with wonderful tales, not always within the bounds of veracity. When his work is done he removes to another central point, and after he has amassed as many fees as his mule can carry, for they usually pay in cheese and butter, he returns to his town and realizes a handsome profit. Cattle merchants also come, generally rascally Kourds, and over endless cups of coffee effect the purchase of the surplus flock which the nomads do not wish to take with them up to the mountains. They are always spring visitors, and their tents are the centre of great excitement for days together. Around them sit the chiefs of the tribes in solemn silence, smoking their long pipes and sipping coffee, whilst the women come up outside with the goats and sheep to be offered for sale, screaming and yelling as is their wont. When the merchants have collected as many animals as they can manage, they set off with them to the towns where they can effect a profitable sale. Camel dealers, wool merchants, skin merchants, and tax-collectors all make their periodical rounds amongst the nomads, and as each tribe visits the same pastures every year at stated times, there is no difficulty for those accustomed to their habits to know where to find their clients. Besides their pastoral vocations the nomads have a few other sources of liveli. hood. The Yourouks with whom we dwelt at Maidan occupy themselves in making pitch. Two circular holes are dug in the ground; into one of these they cast fir branches, which they burn, and the turpentine flows out of it, as from a winepress, into the other hole. Their tents were redolent with pitch collected like rancid butter in skins, and pressed down, and not a whit more agreeable. Other tribes devote some of their time to charcoal-burning, and one and all they are frightfully destructive to the forests among which they wander. Acres of fine straight fir-trees, such as ship merchants would give good prices for for masts, are burnt annually by their fires; acres are cut down ruthlessly to secure pasturage for the flocks; and hundreds of trees are annually destroyed by tapping them just above the roots for turpentine. Before aniline dyes were invented the Yourouks drove a good trade in colormaking from the herbs which grow on their mountain-sides; but now, alas! even for the purpose of dyeing their own wools for carpet-making, they purchase atrocious colors from Europe, with the result that their trade is gone, and with it the harmony in colors for which their carpets were once celebrated. Why they should have developed a taste for magenta, grassgreen, and kindred colors, which are so different from their own, is a mystery, but such is the melancholy fact. Every household commodity is made at home. The women spin their husbands' clothes, and it is not an uncommon thing to see an old Yourouk man, whose days of active work are over, plying the distaff like his wife, or standing at his tent door with a spindle in his hands. Their shoes are made out of raw untanned hide, cut in a circle, and fastened round the instep by a thong. These are most excellent things for adhering to their rocky paths far better than my boots when those rocks were slippery. They put their shoes into water every night to prevent their getting hard, and a pair will last about a fortnight. They sow for themselves only just enough grain for domestic use, in the mountain valleys and in every tiny level space where there is an absence of rock, and they are few and far between in rugged Čilicia. Their threshing-floors are round, flat spaces constructed at the edge of their fields round which they are accus tomed to drive over the grain on pieces of wood with bits of flint set in below most probably bearing a striking resemblance to the "new sharp threshing instrument having teeth" mentioned by Isaiah (xli. 15). For grinding grain the wealthier have the regular grindstones with two handles, common in the East; but the poorer are content to grind their grain in holes or natural mortars in the rocks, with a rounded stone for pestle. High up in the Taurus range, shortly before the passes into Karamania are reached, we archæological nomads came across the object of our search namely, the capital of the district of Olba, where the priest-kings of the Cilician pirates held their court. Still we were always amongst Yourouks, who have converted the ruins of this ancient capital on the hill of the castle of Djebel Hissar, as they call it, into the nearest approach to a village that the district contains. The inhabitants of this spot are perhaps the most sedentary of their race, inasmuch as the spot is thirty-eight hundred feet above the level of the sea. They can here remain all the year round, though how they pass the winter months in those miserable hovels amid ice and snow was a mystery to us. Even in April the snow had not long disappeared, and the cold, biting winds made us pile on logs to our fire, despite the blinding smoke which poured from it into our den. The capital of the pirate district, even in its ruins, is very fine. It consists of two distinct parts -one on the hill, where are the principal buildings, and one in the valley below, about one and a half miles distant; these towns were joined by a fine paved road, lined on both sides with rockcut tombs and ruined buildings. It was on an aqueduct which supplied the lower town with water that we found an inscription which settled the question as to the discovery of the object of our search: "The city of the Olbian Castles erected this water-course." It was a late inscription of the Roman period, but for this we did not care- the site of the capital of the pirates was found. Up in the higher town the two chief buildings were a fort and the Temple of Jove. On the fort we found an inscription which told us that it was erected "under the priesthood of Teucer, the son of Tarkyarios, and under the direction of Tberemos, the son of Orbalaseta of Olba." Such a formula as this we found on the fortress at the lip of the Olbian cave, near the sea, and the statements of Strabo as to the dynasty and priesthood of Teucer were substantially confirmed. The great temple was about half a mile from the fort. It owes its preservation to the fact that it was subsequently converted into a Christian church; the columns are all there, thirty-two in all, of the Corinthian order, and most of the wall enclosing the sacred precincts is still standing. This was the shrine where the priest-kings of the Teucrid dynasty held their sacerdotal court. A few hundred yards from the Temple of Jove were five elegant columns standing, with monolithic granite shafts and Corinthian capitals — all that is left of a temple of Tyche, which, from an inscription, we were able to name. There stood, too, a Roman triumphal arch, the remains of a long colonnade, a theatre, and many other buildings on this hill of ruins, and as we contemplated them we were full of admiration for the pirates who had erected them. In the district of Olba we found something like seventy inscriptions, giving us true glimpses of the history of the pirates. In the world's history it has been the fate of many men and many races who have not written their own history, to suffer, like authors who cannot review their own books, from the adverse criticism of the opposite side. Luckily for the Cilician pirates they have left ruins behind them, and decrees, inscriptions, and bas-reliefs on their rocks, which prove to us that they were no ruffian bandits, like those which now haunt Asia Minor, but a race of wealthy, civilized, and independent men, whose marauding was doubtless carried on in self-defence, and in resistance to that gigantic power which eventually crushed them in its iron grasp. J. THEODORE Bent. From Longman's Magazine. nominal price. If you don't indulge in these luxuries, but have the fear of Sir Wilfrid before you, why then you can bask in the surf and literally wallow in peaches. There the trammels of civilization utterly decline to work, and Arcadia is revived. For the romantic, the shepherd and shepherdess life; for the more sordidly disposed, air like champagne, and the Globe and Pall Mall of the previous evening." And I backed up my statement to a certain extent by a reference to "Caste." Who that witnessed the scene can ever forget Bancroft as he stood, with difficulty keeping Eccles at bay with his walkingstick, while he endeavored to impress on him the desirability of the Norman archipelago as a permanent residence? However, while I importuned my friends, in season and out of season, to go to Sark, I steadily refrained from going there myself. I have noticed that in this respect I bear a strong resemblance to other people whose forte is advising. At last the propitious moment arrived. The summer, both in England and on the Continent, was in a hopeless condition. The Channel Islands, and therein more particularly Sark, Serk, or Sercq, presented an offchance of a higher temperature within measurable distance. Accompanied by the faithful companion of my toils and sharer of my joys"in short," as Mr. Micawber would say, by my wife -I took ship and so to Guernsey. Arriv I ONCE had a friend who made a fruit-ing there in early morning I had just time less attempt to induce me to accompany him to Copenhagen by representing to me that the cherry brandy was undeniable and as cheap as water, and that all the women were exactly like the Princess of Wales. Sixteen years ago I first set foot in Sark, and although my stay was limited to some six hours or so-in fact a day's trip from Guernsey - my life has ever since been more or less tinged with the romance of that visit, and many are the occasions on which I have burdened my friends with my reminiscences of that Summer isle of Eden, lying bosomed in deep purple seas. before breakfast to satisfy myself that one of my impressions of that sixteen years' old visit was not a delusion, and that Guernsey still possesses what is to my mind incomparably the best bathing-place in the world. Talk of Boveney and Sandford and the upper reaches of the Thames generally! they can't hold a candle to it; and the ordinary sea-bathing-place of com. merce I consider to be utterly beneath contempt. Here you have what appears to be a large basin cut out of the rock, and protected seawards by a strong wall devised that you can suit yourselves with fitted with natural platforms so cunningly any depth of water from one to nine feet and any form of "header." The tide comes in over the wall, ensuring a complete change of water twice daily, and, when it is out, it leaves you the most perfect pool of still water to bathe in. If you prefer the open sea, you can always have it by diving off the wall at low tide or simply swimming over it at high water; but, to me, the absence of wave means perfection in bathing. I will only add that I am in |