coast, where she was lost with all her treasures, and Nicolou was
but too glad to scramble ashore, though without one dollar in his
girdle. These adventures seem flat enough as I repeat them, but
the hero expressed his terrors by such odd terms of speech, and
such strangely humorous gestures, that the story came from his lips
with an unfailing zest, so that the crew, who had heard the tale so
often, could still enjoy to their hearts' content the rich fright
of the Admiral, and still shuddered with unabated horror when he
came to the loss of the dollars.

The power of listening to long stories (for which, by-the-bye, I am
giving you large credit) is common, I fancy, to most sailors, and
the Greeks have it to a high degree, for they can be perfectly
patient under a narrative of two or three hours' duration. These
long stories are mostly founded upon Oriental topics, and in one of
them I recognised with some alteration an old friend of the
"Arabian Nights." I inquired as to the source from which the story
had been derived, and the crew all agreed that it had been handed
down unwritten from Greek to Greek. Their account of the matter
does not, perhaps, go very far towards showing the real origin of
the tale; but when I afterwards took up the "Arabian Nights," I
became strongly impressed with a notion that they must have sprung
from the brain of a Greek. It seems to me that these stories,
whilst they disclose a complete and habitual KNOWLEDGE of things
Asiatic, have about them so much of freshness and life, so much of
the stirring and volatile European character, that they cannot have
owed their conception to a mere Oriental, who for creative purposes
is a thing dead and dry--a mental mummy, that may have been a live
king just after the Flood, but has since lain balmed in spice. At
the time of the Caliphat the Greek race was familiar enough to