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At the villages where the burchiello touched for refreshments, handsome young women in scarlet bodices came on board with baskets of melons, grapes, figs and peaches; and under the trellises on the landings, lads and girls with flowers in their hair were dancing the monferrina to the rattle of tambourines or the chant of some wandering ballad-singer.
Music too was there; the shrill peal of the Median trumpet, and soft tone of the Phrygian flute; the Jewish cymbal and harp, Paphlagonian tambourines and the stringed instruments of Ionia; Syrian kettle-drums and cymbals, the shells and drums of the Arians from the mouth of the Indus, and the loud notes of the Bactrian battle-trumpets.
The streets were crowded with people. Priests were passing in processions, beating their dreary tambourines; police and custom-house officers with pointed hats encrusted with lac and carrying two sabres hung to their waists; soldiers, clad in blue cotton with white stripes, and bearing guns; the Mikado's guards, enveloped in silken doubles, hauberks and coats of mail; and numbers of military folk of all ranks for the military profession is as much respected in Japan as it is despised in China went hither and thither in groups and pairs.
I do not now recall her name, but she was of a noble family, of which fact the mother and daughter were very proud, and the young girl was a good musician, and sang agreeably; but, which appeared to me as ridiculous as indecent, she danced the ballet before a large company in her mother's house, in a costume almost as light as those of the opera, with castanets or tambourines, and ended her dance with a multiplicity of attitudes and graces.
The only army that he now has eyes for is the army of the odalisks and slave-girls, who seize their tambourines and mandolines, and weave the light dance around the happy imperial couple, singing sweet songs of enchantment, while outside through the streets of Stambul gun-carriages are rattling along, and the mob, in a frenzy of enthusiasm, clamours for a war of extermination against the invading Shiites.
Yonder a child thrown to the ground screamed shrilly, there a dog trodden under the feet of the crowd howled piteously. So clear and resonant were the shouts of joy that they rose high above the flutes and tambourines, the cymbals and lutes of the musicians, who followed the man approaching in the robes of a god.
Then came a richly-dressed and much be-wreathed Dionysian chorus with the sound of tambourines and lyres, double flutes and triangles, and finally, drawn by ten elephants and twenty white horses, a large ship, resting on wheels and gilt from stem to stern, representing the vessel in which the Tyrrhenian pirates were said to have carried off the young Dionysus when they had seen the black-haired hero on the shore in his purple garments.
Messengers, one after another, were sent out from thence to command silence in the great halls, where the assembled youths and girls were kissing, singing, shouting and dancing to the shrill pipe of flutes and twang of lutes, clapping their hands, rattling tambourines in short, enjoying to the utmost the few hours that might yet be theirs before they must make the fatal leap into nothingness, or at least into the dim shades of death.
Sleep during this interval was out of the question: the ancient harp of Cambria suspended the celebration of the noble race of Shenkin, and the songs of Hoel and Cyveilioc, to ring to the profaner but more lively modulation of Voulez vous danser, Mademoiselle? in conjunction with the symphonious scraping of fiddles, the tinkling of triangles, and the beating of tambourines. The company assembled.
We reached here Saturday night. Sunday morning, hearing a silver triangle played in the streets, we looked out for tambourines and dancing-girls, but saw none, and were presently told it was the call to church. We were quite tempted to go and hear what the service would be, but the sound of the breakers on the bar enchained us to stop and listen to them. PORTLAND, ORE., October 20, 1868.
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