notes to what seemed to me then a sort of | But though the flowers returned home much crushed and dilapidated, and though fairy in white. She stood on tiny feet, she put up a delicate finger and sent forth a sweet vibration of song in answer, sweeter, shriller, more charming every instant. Did she fly right up into the air, or was it my own head that came down with a sleepy nod? I slept, I awoke; and each time I was conscious of this exquisite, floating ripple of music flowing in and out of my dreams. The singer was Mademoiselle Sontag; it was the "Elisire," or some such opera, overflowing like a lark's carol. All the great, golden house applauded; my father applauded. I longed to hear more, but in vain I struggled, I only slumbered again, waking from minute to minute to see the lovely little lady in white still standing there, still pouring forth her melody to the thousand lights and people. I find when I consult my faithful confidante and sympathizer in these small memories of what is now so nearly forgotten, that I am not alone in my admiring impressions of this charming person. My confidante is the " Biographie Générale," where I find an account, no sleepy, visionary impression, such as my own, but a very definite and charming portrait of the bright fairy of my dreams, of Mademoiselle Sontag, Comtesse Rossi, who came to London in 1849: "On rémarquait surtout la limpidité de ses gammes chromatiques et l'éclat de ses trilles... Et toutes ces merveilles s'accomplissaient avec une grâce parfaite, sans que le regard fût jamais attristé par le moindre effort. La figure charmante de Mademoiselle Sontag, ses beaux yeux bleus, limpides et doux, ses formes élégantes, sa taille élancée et souple ache-medlar-tree, and the Spanish jessamines vaient le tableau et complétaient l'enchantement." It seems sad to have enjoyed this delightful performance only in one's dreams, but in the humiliating circumstances, when the whole world was heaving and struggling to hear the great singer of the North, and when the usual box arrived for the "Figlia del Reggimento," my grandmother, who was with us, invited two friends of her own, grown up and accustomed to keep awake, and my sister and I were not taken. We were not disappointed, we imagined the songs for ourselves as children do. We gathered all our verbenas and geraniums for a nosegay, and gave it to our guests to carry, and watched the carriage roll off in the twilight with wild hopes, unexpressed, that perhaps the flowers would be cast upon the stage at the feet of the great singer. My father used to write in his study at the back of the house in Young Street. The vine shaded his two windows, which looked out upon the bit of garden, and the of which the yellow flowers scented our old brick walls. I can remember the tortoise belonging to the boys next door crawling along the top of the wall and making its way between the jessamine sprigs. Jessamines won't grow now any more, as they did then, in the gardens of Kensington, nor will medlars and vine trees take root and spread their green branches; only herbs and bulbs, such as lilies and Solomon seals, seem to flourish, though I have a faint hope that all the things people put in will come up all right some centuries hence, when London is resting and at peace, and has turned into the grass-grown ruin one so often hears described. Our garden was not tidy (though on one grand occasion a man came to mow the grass) but it was full of sweet things. There were verbenas - red, blue, and scented; and there were lovely stacks "You of flags, blades of green with purple heads | for the sake of old times. I don't know One of my friends - she never lived to be an old woman - used to laugh and say that she had reached the time of life when she loved to see even the people her parents had particularly disliked, just full of delicious things, and how glad we were when they came to our youthful portion at last, after our elders and our governess and our butler had read them. It is curious to me now to remember, considering how little we met and what a long way off they lived, what an important part the Dickens household played in our her. And then he made a little speech, childhood. But those books were as much a part of our home as our own father's. with one hand on the table; I think it was Certainly the Dickens children's parties thanking the jeunesse dorée for their ap. were shining facts in our early London plause, and they again clapped and days nothing came near them. There laughed - but here my memory fails me were other parties and they were very and everything grows very vague and like nice, but nothing to compare to these; a dream. not nearly so light, not nearly so shining, Only this much I do remember very not nearly so going round and round. Per- clearly, that we had danced and supped haps so dear K. P. suggests it was not and danced again, and that we were all all as brilliantly wonderful as I imagined standing in a hall lighted and hung with it, but most assuredly the spirit of mirth bunches of Christmas green, and, as I and kindly jollity was a reality to every have said, everything seemed altogether one present, and the master of the house magnificent and important, more magnifi had that wondrous fairy gift of leadership. cent and important every minute, for as I know not what to call that power by the evening went on, more and more peowhich he inspired every one with spirit ple kept arriving. The hall was crowded, and interest. One special party I remem- and the broad staircase was lined with ber, which seemed to me to go on for years little boys thousands of little boys with its kind, gay hospitality, its music, whose heads and legs and arms were wavits streams of children passing and re- ing about together. They were making a passing. We were a little shy coming in great noise, and talking and shouting, and alone in all the consciousness of new the eldest son of the house seemed to be shoes and ribbons, but Mrs. Dickens marshalling them. Presently their noise called us to sit beside her till the long, became a cheer, and then another, and we sweeping dance was over, and talked to looked up and saw that our own father us as if we were grown up, which is al-had come to fetch us, and that his white ways flattering to little girls. Then Miss head was there above the others; then Hogarth found us partners, and we too came a third final ringing cheer, and some formed part of the throng. I remember one went up to him—it was Mr. Dickens watching the white satin shoes and long, himself and laughed and said quickly, flowing white sashes of the little Dickens "That is for you!" and my father looked girls, who were just about our own age, up surprised, pleased, touched, settled his but how much more gracefully and beauti-spectacles and nodded gravely to the little fully dressed. Our sashes were bright boys. plaids of red and blue (tributes from one of our father's admirers. Is it ungrateful to confess now after all these years that ANNE RITCHIE. From Blackwood's Magazine. CILICIA. WE started with three months of nomad life before us from Mersina, a port of Asia Minor, real genuine nomad life in a hitherto unexplored district, without a village or a town to speak of, up in the lofty mountains of "rugged Cilicia," where for this period we should meet none save wanderers like ourselves; pastoral wanderers, who go from pasture to pasture as necessity compels; whilst we professed to be archæological nomads, who went from one set of ruins to another in search of fresh material concerning a long ago defunct race of mankind. we could not bear them ?), our shoes were only bronze. Shall I also own to this passing shadow, even in all that radiance? ARCHEOLOGICAL NOMADS IN RUGGED But when people are once dancing they are all equal again and happy. Somehow after the music we all floated into a long supper room, and I found myself sitting near the head of the table by Mr. Dickens, with another little girl much younger than myself; she wore a necklace and pretty little sausage curls all round her head. Mr. Dickens was very kind to the little girl, and presently I heard him persuading her to sing, and he put his arm round her to encourage her; and then, wonderful to say, the little girl stood up (she was little Miss Hullah) and began very shyly, trembling and blushing at first, but as she blushed and trembled she sang more and A word or two concerning this country, more sweetly; and then all the jeunesse its present and its past, before we dive dorée, consisting of the little Dickens boys into its gorges and lose ourselves in its and their friends, ranged along the supper maze of rock and brushwood. This distable, clapped and clapped, and Mr. Dick-trict, known to the ancients as "Cilicia ens bent down to her smiling and thanking | Aspera," from its rugged appearance, lies on the southern slopes of the Taurus to acknowledge the conquering arm of • Isocrates Panegyricus (Or. 4, § 161). + Strabo, xiv., ch. 5, 10. "And then higher up than this place (Anchiale, mod. Mersina) and Soli is a moun- We took everything with us beds, tables, chairs, tent, and groceries - trusting only to find a sufficiency of meat and milk amongst the nomad tribes. But in the former case we were doomed to disappointment, owing to two somewhat differ ent causes. In the first place, they would | quired if they were not afraid of it, and if not part with their lambs and kids, because the flocks had run down during the recent years of famine; and secondly, the fowls were scarce, because they had last year found an excellent market for them at Mersina, where the French steamer touches, and all the poultry had been conveyed to France for consumption during the exhibition time. Consequently though milk and butter were plentiful we had to content ourselves with the flesh of goats well stricken in years, and every one knows that this is by no means palatable. On the first plateau above the sea-level we visited three curious depressions in the ground, averaging two hundred feet in depth; one was eight hundred feet long, another was a quarter of a mile round, and the third three-quarters. The walls of these holes were of calcareous formation, and had in places been decorated by the pirates of old with quaint bas-reliefs and inscriptions. At the bottom of these holes flourished the wild verdure of the mountains, a dense jungle of carobs, pomegranates, myrtle, and prickly thorns; and Strabo told us how in his time flourished here excellent saffron, and I doubt not that he was right, for though we found none there, we saw abundance of it on the mountains around. The largest of these depressions had a cave at its southern extremity, eating its way for a couple of hundred feet into the rock. This was the anciently famed Corycian Cave, about three miles behind the old town of Corycos, which Strabo tells us was celebrated in ancient cult as the prison where Jove kept bound the giant Typhon,* and where in those olden days frenzied oracles were uttered by its priests. Here we found several inscriptions identifying it, and accidentally by pulling down an outer wall in the temple of Jove which stood at the lip of the cave, we came across a list of the priest-kings of this district, one hundred and sixty-two in all, the rulers of the race of pirates down to the very last name before they were formed into a Roman province. This last name was that of King Archelaus, about whom Josephus has a good deal to tell us, whose daughter, Glaphyra, married the son of Herod the Great, and whose advice was much sought after by that monarch in settling his family disputes. they never saw dread sights therein. 66 The old man also told us that the smoke of fires lighted in the Corycian Cave comes out here, and it is doubtless true; for these depressions have been made by one of those subterranean streams common in Asia Minor, and known by the name of dudens, making its way to the surface, so that there is probably an underground communication between the two. Five miles from this spot there is a third depression similar in every respect to the Corycian Cave, with an old polygonal fortress of the pirates built at its lip, and anciently entered by a sloping road made of polygonal masonry. All this older masonry belongs to the pirate period, whereas the fine buildings by the coast and the magnificent tombs and sarcophagi were constructed after the Romans subdued the district. The pirates were naturally great devotees of Hermes, the god of illicit gain, and in our wanderings through this district we found three cave-temples walled up with polygonal This is quite one of the most awe-in-masonry and dedicated to the god of plunspiring spots I have ever seen, and from the nomads who dwell on its edge we in * Strabo, p. 670; Æschylus, Prom. 351; and Pindar, Pyth. i. 31. der. From inscriptions we learned that this third depression was dedicated to the Olbian Jove, of whom classic lore is silent, though I doubt not in those dark ages he |