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sive and sometimes pleasant walks on their tops.

In viewing the scene, in the Panorama, you seem to stand on the top of the governor's house, and near you, on one side, is Mr. Catherwood himself, sitting at a table, with his pencil and drawing paper by him. South of you stands the Mosque of Omar, one of the largest and most splendid buildings in the world. It is on the very spot where stood the ancient temple of Solomon; and is a regular octagon ; and each of its eight sides measures 70 feet. Of course it is 560 feet, or almost one eighth of a mile in circumference! It has four great doors, on as many sides of the building; and the walls are of marble below, and tiles above. On the top is a large dome, covered with lead and crowned with a gilt crescent. The whole building to the top of the dome is 90 feet in heighth. Around the mosque is a beautiful raised platform, paved with white marble, 450 feet in length from north to south, and 399 from east to west.

This mosque, I say, is one of the first objects that strikes your eye, on looking round you from the top of the house, where you stand. But you see on every side large, ugly-looking stone buildings; some of them with square tops made of brick or mud, and some of them with domes. The streets are so exceedingly narrow between the buildings that you can scarcely see them, except here and there a small portion of one; and there are very few trees.

Casting your eyes eastward, across the eastern wall of the city, and looking beyond the narrow valley, called the valley of Jehusaphat, you see Mount Olivet, with a small scattered village on its top called Olivet, in which stands a small mosque with a dome. This mosque is on the spot from which tradition says our Saviour ascended to Heaven.

Northeastward you see a very romantic but rather barren country, and southeast is the valley of the Dead Sea, beyond which are the hills on which Bethlehem was situated. Southwest of where you stand is what they call the Hill of Calvary and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

When you have looked around you for some time, you will come back to observe once more what is going on near you, on the very top of the house. Here on one part of the house you will see a Damascus merchant, exhibiting his goods for sale and very leisurely smoking from his long pipe. A little way off in another direction are some Arabian robbers. Having been taken and tried by the governor, one of them is about to be punished by the bastinado.

In one direction-toward the mosque of Omar-you will see many Turks at prayer in various places, and one or two funeral processions. The individuals appear as large as life, and such is the deception produced after you have looked at the picture a little while, that every thing appears perfectly natural, and you can hardly bring yourself to believe

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boast of. His name was Puccio d'Aniello (out of which was afterwards formed Pulcinello) and determined to take advantage of his talent, they prevailed on him to join their company. He became so great a favorite with the audience that, after his death, he was represented by another person wearing a mask similar to his extravagant and ludicrous visage. Pulcinello is still the delight of the Neapolitans, and figures at the theatres and at popular festivals; particularly at the carnival.* He speaks the dialect of the peasantry, and is always personated by a man whose chief aim is to make the spectators laugh. He is generally habited in a large white woollen dress sprinkled with hearts of red cloth; it is trimmed with fringe, and

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PUNCHINELLO Or Punch is a character well known at puppet-shows. His origin is said to be as follows. A company of Neapolitan actors went to the village of Acerra at the time of the vintage, which in wine-countries is always a season of rejoicing and festivity. They found among the peasants a mis-shapen. hunch-backed man with large grotesque features, whose comic humour far exceeded any the players themselves could in the week previous to the beginning of Lent. See p. 52.

* The term carnival is derived from two Latin words, carne (flesh) and vale (farewell) and signifies to take leave of meat. It is celebrated only in Catholic countries, and

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GLEANINGS AND RECOLLECTIONS.

fastened round the waist by a leather silent, inert, and that he can derive from belt; his sleeves and trowsers being her neither amusement nor happiness. very wide and full. A stiff linen ruff Unfortunately, while so many young surrounds his neck, and on his head is girls are educated merely for the pura pointed white woollen cap terminating pose of producing effect at parties and at the top in a red tassel. His nose and balls, there will always be men who, chin are curved, pointed, and very large. having obtained wives, find themselves Three fourths of his face are sometimes in the predicament of the nobleman that covered with a black mask. In Eng- bought Punch. land and America, Punchinello is rarely seen but at puppet-shows, where he is a small wooden figure (generally made of lignumvita) and appropriately dressed. His joints are moved by unseen wires managed by a person behind the scenes, or underneath the little stage; and this person or another (concealed also) talks and sings for him; usually in a shrill squeaking voice.

There is a story of a very ignorant nobleman, who, on seeing a puppet-show for the first time, was so delighted with Punch that when the exhibition was over he insisted on buying him for his own private amusement. But on carrying him home, the nobleman was much disappointed to find that Punch when away from the puppet-show, and removed from the influence that had directed him, had lost all power of amusing, and was nothing but an inanimate and speechless bit of wood. This anecdote is sometimes applied to a man who marries a young lady that he has only seen in company, where she can show off her accomplishments: but after taking her home as his wife, he discovers, when too late, that in domestic life she is dull,

CICERONE is a person (particularly in Italy) who shows and explains to strangers, antiquities and curiosities. The plural is ciceroni, and their talkativeness has procured them the name in allusion to Cicero the Roman orator. In England the people that get their living by attending at the show-places, and explaining sights to visitors, are frequently of a very low order, and grossly ignorant; repeating their lesson like par rots with little or no comprehension of the subject, and often making the most ludicrous blunders. For instance, a man that formerly showed the Bodleian Library at Oxford, used to say on coming to the portrait of the distinguished navigator Sir Martin Frobisher, (who in the reign of queen Elizabeth accom panied Drake on a voyage of discovery in the West Indian seas), "This is the portright of captain Furbish who shot the Gulph of Mexico; and there is the very pistol in his hand with which he committed the bloody deed."

Very lately a showman in London, who had something to exhibit relating to captain Ross's voyage in the Arctic re

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GLEANINGS AND RECOLLECTIONS.

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gions, stood at the door of his show-place, placed a broad collar of cylindrical glass saying, "Walk in, ladies and gentle- beads of various colours, closely intermen, and here you will see the valiant woven, and so arranged as to form imacaptain Ross a-climbing up the great ges of Egyptian divinities, such as the north pole." scarabæus or beetle, the ibis, the winged globe, &c. The mummy was then deposited in a coffin of sycamore or cedar, which was painted and gilt, and covered with hieroglyphics representing perhaps the actions of the deceased or of his ancestors. Mummies, undoubtedly two or three thousand years old, have been found in the tombs near Cairo; also in the vicinity of Memphis, and in the ruins of Thebes.

MUMMIES-Are the dead bodies of the ancient Egyptians, preserved by first embalming, and then enclosing in numerous folds of linen spread with a cement called momia in Arabic, and mum in Coptic (the languages that now prevail in Egypt,) and hence the word mummy. The cement is a preparation of bitumen or asphaltus, and is of the consistence of tar. The bodies of the rich and great, after being filled with aromatic gums and various odoriferous compounds, were first steeped in balsam, and then wrapped or rather rolled up in linen smeared with the glutinous substance called momia or mum, by which all the layers of the covering were firmly cemented together. Every finger and toe was separately wrapped in a bandage of linen, the nails being first gilded. Bandages were then folded round each of the limbs, and finally a large one enveloped the whole corpse, to the number of fifteen or twenty folds of linen, all united by the cement. The head was wrapped in folds of fine muslin (also cemented) and then coated on the outside with fine plaster painted and gilt so as to resemble a very large mask. Where the head joined the body, was

Many years since, I saw in the British museum two mummies in large glass cases, standing upright beside their immense coffins. The mummies, black, shrivelled, and looking something like dried baboons, were disgusting objects, notwithstanding the great pains and expense bestowed on their preservation: an evidence how impossible it is for human art to triumph over the immutable laws of nature. Still, it was interesting to see what yet remained of persons that were living and walking and talking in the time of the Pharaohs.

They show in the museum at Copenhagen a mummy, the nose of which is said to have been bitten off by Peter the Great, a singular fancy, but by no means out of accordance with other strange and half savage exploits of that extraordinary monarch.

THE anniversary of the Boston Massacre is on the fifth of March. The British troops fired upon the Americans in King street, now called State street, and killed five men, March 5th, 1770.

A CHAPTER OF ANECDOTES.

HOW A JEST WAS NO JOKE.

WHEN I was a little child of five or six years old, I and my sister, rather older than myself, were taken by our father to spend a summer's day in Needwood Forest. We were little wild things, as brown and as hardy as Gipsies, and many a long happy day we had spent under the forest trees, dining in woodmen's cottages, or if none were at hand, by the side of a little running stream in some old woodland hollow.

Towards noon, on one of these happy days, as we were wearied with a long morning's ramble, we were left to recover from our fatigue under the spreading shade of an immense tree, like fairies in a fairy-tale; looking as diminutive as they in proportion to this giant of the forest, and being almost lost among its curled and twisted roots, which were heaved up, old and mossed and rugged, and wreathed together like a nest of angry snakes, which had been turned to stone, ages and ages before. Around us lay a small opening of forest glade, covered with short green grass, upon which the sunshine fell with such soft light as to give it the colour of clear emerald; this was enclosed by thickets of black holly, which, in contrast with the light foreground, looked still more intensely dark under and among these grew the greenwood-laurel with its clusters of poisonous-looking berries, and whole beds of the fair, white stellaria, shining

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BY MARY HOWITT.

like stars (whence its name) among its grass-like leaves of tender green. In other spots grew clusters of the dark, mysterious-looking enchanter's nightshade; and the singular and rare fourleaved Herb-Paris, or True-love, bearing its berry-like flower at the central angles of its four leaves.

There was an undefined feeling, half of pleasure and half of pain, in being left alone in so wild a spot. We heard the crow of the distant pheasant-the coo-coo of the wood-pigeon, and the laugh-like cry of the wood-pecker; and these, though familiar to us, seemed strangely to add to the solitariness of the scene. And yet it was very delightful. We talked cheerfully of every thing around us; watched the hare run past, or from thicket to thicket; and the starling creep up the old trees, and the little birds fly in and out from their woody screens, with more than common interest.

and

But at length, after long watching long observation, we remarked to each other a strange, unceasing, low sound which we could not comprehend; it seemed to keep up a perpetual chirrchirr-r-r-ing, somewhere near us, but exactly where, we could not tell. At times it appeared just beside us, and then half the glade's distance off; now it was high, now low, now on this side, now on that-the strangest, most perplexing, and incomprehensible sound we had ever heard.

In the midst of our wonderment and

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