day, lugging an enormous bundle under each arm, the Poet came. We were stunned as he stood in the door; we felt as if he had struck us in the head with them.

“This is the Histoire Intime,” said he, laying it gently on the table.

And we laid our hand upon it, fetching a deep sigh. Our misgivings, however, were lighted with a happy idea. We will hire a few boys to read it, we thought, and mark out the passages which please them most. That will be just what an editor wants.

“And this,” continued the Poet, laying down the other bundle, “is the original manuscript of my forthcoming Book of Poems.––”

Sweet of him, we thought, to present it to us.

“It will be issued next Autumn in Cairo.––”

Fortunate City!

“And if you will get to work on it at once,––”

Mercy!

“You can get out an English Translation in three month, I am sure––”

We sink in our chair in breathless amazement.

“The Book will then appear simultaneously both in London and Cairo.”

We sit up, revived with another happy idea, and assure the Poet that his Work will be translated into a universal language, and that very soon. For which 13 assurance he kisses us again and again, and goes away hugging his Muse.

The idea! A Book of Poems to translate into the English language! As if the English language has not enough of its own troubles! Translate it, O Fire, into your language! Which work the Fire did in two minutes. And the dancing, leaping, singing flames, the white and blue and amber flames, were more beautiful, we thought, than anything the Ms. might contain.

As for the Histoire Intime, we split it into three parts and got our boys working on it. The result was most satisfying. For now we can show, and though he is a native of Asia, the land of the Prophets, and though he conceals from us his origin after the manner of the Prophets, that he was born and bred and fed, and even thwacked, like all his fellows there, this Khalid.

The City of Baal, or Baalbek, is between the desert and the deep sea. It lies at the foot of Anti-Libanus, in the sunny plains of Coele-Syria, a day’s march from either Damascus or Beirut. It is a city with a past as romantic as Rome’s, as wicked as Babel’s; its ruins testify both to its glory and its shame. It is a city with a future as brilliant as any New-World city; the railroad at its gate, the modern agricultural implements in its fields, and the porcelain bath-tubs in its hotels, can testify to this. It is a city that enticed and still entices the mighty of the earth; Roman Emperors in the past came to appease the wrath of its gods, a German Emperor to-day comes to pilfer its temples. For the Acropolis in the poplar grove is a mine of ruins. The porphyry pillars, the statues, the tablets, the exquisite friezes, the palimpsests, the bas-reliefs,––Time and the Turks have spared a few of these. And when the German Emperor came, Abd’ul-Hamid blinked, and the Berlin Museum is now the richer for it.

Of the Temple of Jupiter, however, only six standing columns remain; of the Temple of Bacchus only the god and the Bacchantes are missing. And why was the one destroyed, the other preserved, only the 15 six columns, had they a tongue, could tell. Indeed, how many blustering vandals have they conquered, how many savage attacks have they resisted, what wonders and what orgies have they beheld! These six giants of antiquity, looking over Anti-Lebanon in the East, and down upon the meandering Leontes in the South, and across the Syrian steppes in the North, still hold their own against Time and the Elements. They are the dominating feature of the ruins; they tower above them as the Acropolis towers above the surrounding poplars. And around their base, and through the fissures, flows the perennial grace of the seasons. The sun pays tribute to them in gold; the rain, in mosses and ferns; the Spring, in lupine flowers. And the swallows, nesting in the portico of the Temple of Bacchus, above the curious frieze of egg-decoration,––as curious, too, their art of egg-making,––pour around the colossal columns their silvery notes. Surely, these swallows and ferns and lupine flowers are more ancient than the Acropolis. And the marvels of extinct nations can not hold a candle to the marvels of Nature.

Here, under the decaying beauty of Roman art, lies buried the monumental boldness of the Phœnicians, or of a race of giants whose extinction even Homer deplores, and whose name even the Phœnicians could not decipher. For might they not, too, have stood here wondering, guessing, even as we moderns guess and wonder? Might not the Phœnicians have asked the same questions that we ask to-day: Who were the builders? and with what tools? In one of the walls 16 of the Acropolis are stones which a hundred bricklayers can not raise an inch from the ground; and among the ruins of the Temple of Zeus are porphyry pillars, monoliths, which fifty horses could barely move, and the quarry of which is beyond the Syrian desert. There, now, solve the problem for yourself.

Hidden in the grove of silver-tufted poplars is the little Temple of Venus, doomed to keep company with a Mosque. But it is a joy to stand on the bridge above the stream that flows between them, and listen to the muazzen in the minaret and the bulbuls in the Temple. Mohammad calling to Venus, Venus calling to Mohammad––what a romance! We leave the subject to the poet that wants it. Another Laus Veneris to another Swinburne might suggest itself.

An Arab Prophet with the goddess, this time––but the River flows between the Temple and the Mosque. In the city, life is one such picturesque languid stream. The shop-keepers sit on their rugs in their stalls, counting their beads, smoking their narghilahs, waiting indifferently for Allah’s bounties. And the hawkers shuffle along crying their wares in beautiful poetic illusions,––the flower-seller singing, “Reconcile your mother-in-law! Perfume your spirit! Buy a jasmine for your soul!” the seller of loaves, his tray on his head, his arms swinging to a measured step, intoning in pious thankfulness, “O thou Eternal, O thou Bountiful!” The sakka of licorice-juice, clicking his brass cups calls out to the thirsty one, “Come, drink and live! Come, drink and live!” And ere you exclaim, How quaint! How picturesque! a train of 17 laden camels drives you to the wall, rudely shaking your illusion. And the mules and donkeys, tottering under their heavy burdens, upsetting a tray of sweetmeats here, a counter of spices there, must share the narrow street with you and compel you to move along slowly, languidly like themselves. They seem to take Time by the sleeve and say to it, “What’s your hurry?” “These donkeys,” Shakib writes, quoting Khalid, “can teach the strenuous Europeans and hustling Americans a lesson.”

In the City Square, as we issue from the congested windings of the Bazaar, we are greeted by one of those scrub monuments that are found in almost every city of the Ottoman Empire. And in most cases, they are erected to commemorate the benevolence and public zeal of some wali or pasha who must have made a handsome fortune in the promotion of a public enterprise. Be this as it may. It is not our business here to probe the corruption of any particular Government. But we observe that this miserable botch of a monument is to the ruins of the Acropolis, what this modern absolutism, this effete Turkey is to the magnificent tyrannies of yore. Indeed,