Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/82

56 been content to dwell in obscurity for many years at Mytilene, amusing himself with collecting the coins and antiquities of the island. The fine series of silver coins of Lesbos now in the Bibhotheque at Paris was acquired through Dr. Perotti.

Among the Greeks are no very rich merchants, but a bourgeois class, most of whom are land proprietors, and trade in the oil produced by their olives. Not the least respectable among them, if report speak true, are several elderly gentlemen, who, in the troublous times of the Greek revolution, enriched themselves by the issue of forged money, or followed the profession of pirate—time-honoured in the Archipelago.

This native aristocracy, now dominant in the city where Pittacus once ruled, have that sleek, contented air which we associate with the idea of Flemish burgomasters, to whom their picturesque dress still further assimilates them. They generally possess, besides their house in Mytilene, a country house, with a pleasant garden where they smoke and doze life away in the summer heat.

They ride on sturdy mules, and as they wind along the mountain tracks remind me of the fio'ures in the old pictures of the Flight into Egypt. Their accoutrements are of the rudest kinda—great clumsy pack-saddle, over which is thrown a rug, rope stirrups, and a chain attached to a headstall, for the mules are too strong and obstinate for any ordinary bridle; The men generally sit sideways on these pack-saddles, and the women astride. The first time that a lady was seen in Mytilene on a European side-saddle,