Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/43

Rh with a sudden movement, she lays her blushing fingers upon your arm, and cries out, "Yumourdjak!" (Plague! meaning "there is a present of the Plague for you!") This is her notion of a witticism: it is a very old piece of fun, no doubt—quite an oriental Joe Miller; but the Turks are fondly attached, not only to the institutions, but also to the jokes of their ancestors; so, the lady's silvery laugh rings joyously in your ears, and the mirth of her women is boisterous and fresh, as though the bright idea of giving the Plague to a Christian had newly lit upon the earth.

Methley began to rally very soon after we had reached Constantinople, but there seemed at first to be no chance of his regaining strength enough for travelling during the winter; and I determined to stay with my comrade, until he had quite recovered; so I got a horse, and a pipe of tranquillity, and took a Turkish phrase-master. I troubled myself a great deal with the Turkish tongue, and gained at last some knowledge of its structure; it is enriched, perhaps overladen, with Persian and Arabic words, which have been imported into the language, chiefly for the purpose of representing sentiments and religious dogmas, and terms of art and luxury, which were all unknown to the Tartar ancestors of the present Osmanlees; but the body and spirit of the old tongue is yet alive, and the smooth words of the shop-keeper at Constantinople can still carry understanding to the ears of the untamed millions who rove over the plains of Northern Asia. The structure of the language, especially in its more lengthy sentences, is very like to the Latin; the subject matters are slowly and patiently enumerated, without disclosing the purpose of the speaker until he reaches the end of his sentence, and then at last there comes the clenching word, which gives a meaning and connexion to all that has gone before. If you listen at all to speaking of this kind, your attention, rather than be suffered to flag, must grow more and more lively, as the phrase marches on.

The Osmanlees speak well. In countries civilized according to the European plan, the work of trying to persuade tribunals is almost all performed by a set of men, the great body of whom very seldom do anything else; but in Turkey, this division of