with a smart current. After drinking of it, I was much heated. The ground near is quaggy, and will shake beneath the feet, but is cultivated. The grapes, of which we eat, were exquisite. At some distance, opposite, are the other wells, so nearly contiguous as not easily to be counted, or indeed examined, the spot being marish. These have less waste water, are deeper, of a stronger taste, a blacker dye, and more sullen aspect. We filled some vessels with tar, by letting it trickle into them from the boughs which we immersed; and this is the method used to gather it from time to time into pits, where it is hardened by the sun, to be barrelled, when the quantity is sufficient, and taxed as an article of the revenue. The odour reaches a considerable way. We were told that a spring exists likewise in the sea, near the shore; and that the film floats on the smooth surface in calm weather.

Tar-furnaces are numerous in Turkey. They are formed in a bank, the bottom narrow; and filled with sappy wood of pines, cleaved into pieces. A fire is kindled at the top, and, burning downward, the juice, which distils, finds a passage out at a vent below. It has been conjectured, that the thick fluid substance emerging with the water is generated by a process analogous to this; subterraneous fire feeding on sulphureous matter, of which a portion is discharged at these apertures. Our thermometer rose in the air from seventy-five to eighty degrees as the heat of the sun increased during our stay, and in the different wells from sixty-four to seventy. A communication, it is supposed, may subsist between these and springs of a similar nature by Dyrrachium and Apollonia, cities on the coast of Illyria ;

and their common fountain may be some distant volcano.

The tar is said to be emitted most abundantly when the wind is westerly, and when earthquakes happen. These are frequent. Soon after our arrival in the Lazaretto, we felt a very smart shock, which did much damage in the neighbouring island of Cephallenia; and was repeated, but with less violence, six times in the space of about twenty-four hours. The Zantiotes had been familiarized to this source of calamity, and the terror of it was then in a manner swallowed up in their apprehensions for the approaching vintage.

On leaving Athens it was our purpose, after refreshing at Zante, to proceed to Ithaca, Cephallenia, and Corfu, the countries of Ulysses and Alcinous; and from the latter island to Brindisi and Naples. We were compelled to abandon that plan by the difficulty of procuring from Leghorn so large a sum of money as was necessary, and, besides other considerations, by the infirm state of health under which we laboured. The consul accepted our bills for three hundred Venetian zechins; of which near one hundred and thirty were remitted to Mr. Paul the consul at Patræ, who had most readily and obligingly supplied us to that amount. Our return to England was resolved on, and we waited impatiently for the ships expected from Venice; whither it is required that all vessels go before they lade with currants at Zante.

During our residence in the city, the house of a person who had fled from justice was razed to the ground by a party of soldiers; and the body of a state-prisoner, one Balsamachi of Cephallenia, who B b

CHANDLER, GREECE.

had been sent in irons from Constantinople, was exposed for a day on a gallows. He succeeded us in our apartments in the Lazaretto, and, when his quarantine expired, was privately strangled there, conveyed in a boat across the harbour, and suspended in the morning early; a paper hanging on his breast, inscribed with his name, his country, and crime in capital letters.

Some smaller vessels, which arrived, brought us intelligence that the Roman Emperor, captain Lad, and the Sea-horse, captain James, for London, were preparing to sail from Venice. We agreed for a passage, and put our baggage and provisions on board the Roman Emperor, but were induced to remand them; and then fixed our hopes on the Seahorse. That ship tarrying elsewhere, we embarked in the evening, on Sunday, September the 1st, New Style, 1766, in the brig Diligence, captain Long, carrying five men and two boys, bound for Bristol. After a stormy and perilous voyage we anchored in King-road on the 2d of November; but the Seahorse was lost at Scilly on the 11th of the following month.

THE END.

INDEX.

ACADEMY, the 135. 136. Agraulos, temple of 119. 120.