I had seen before. The tunes so soft!—the motions so languishing!—accompanied with pauses and dying eyes! half falling back, and then recovering themselves in so artful a manner."
Before her departure from Adrianople, she went to visit the mosque of Sultan Selim I., and being in a Turkish dress was admitted without difficulty; though she supposes, no doubt rightly, that the doorkeepers understood well enough whom they had allowed to enter. The walls were inlaid with Japan china in the form of flowers, the marble pavement was covered with rich Persian carpets, and the whole body of the edifice free from those pews, forms, and chairs which encumber our churches, both Protestant and Catholic, and give the latter, during week-days, the appearance of a lumber-room. About two thousand lamps were suspended in various parts of the building, which, when lighted at night, must show off to great advantage the solemn splendour of the architecture.
The road to Constantinople carried them through the richest meadows, which, as it was then the month of May, were clothed with exceeding beauty, and so thickly sprinkled with flowers and aromatic herbs, that the wheels of the carriages, crushing them as they drove along, literally perfumed the air. At Kutchuk Tchekmedje, where they lodged in what had formerly been a monastery of dervishes, Lady Montague requested the owner, a country schoolmaster, to show her his own apartments, and was surprised, says she, to see him point to a tall cypress-tree in the garden, on the top of which was a place for a bed for himself, and a little lower one for his wife and two children, who slept there every night. I was so much diverted with the fancy, I resolved to examine his nest nearer; but, after going up fifty steps, I found I had still fifty to go up, and then I must climb from branch to branch with some hazard of my neck; I thought it, therefore, the best way
