220 T1IKIJES. 



besides a lumber or wood room, opening into a little garden enclosed 

 within four walls; but when you look beyond the walls, or rather up 

 into the sky, you see the magnificent boundary wall of cliff crowned with 

 pines on its summit, and a cross affixed on the highest peak of all. By 

 each cell door is a small hole in the wall, at which the father's prov-sions 

 are given in to him; for they only dine in the hall on Sundays and 

 holidays, and even then they do not speak to one another ; for the rule 

 of the Carthusians is one of the strictest of all the monastic orders, and 

 they may not speak either to one another or to strangers without the 

 leave of their superior. 



Before the French revolution the monks had a very considerable 

 property in the forests which surround their monastery. But at the 

 revolution they were deprived both of their forests and their monastery; 

 the former were sold to different individuals, but the latter could never 

 find a purchaser; its remote situation rendering it unfit for any other 

 purpose than that for which it had been originally designed. Accor- 

 dingly, when the Bourbons came back in 18 14, the monks returned to the 

 Grande Chartreuse, and to the possession of the meadows immediately 

 around it, with the liberty of getting their fuel from the adjoining forests. 

 In 1830, there were about two hundred and fifty persons belonging to the 

 monastery, including the fathers and the lay brothers. They visit the 

 sick, and perform spiritual duties in the small chapels and churches 

 scattered over the surrounding mountains. For eight months in the 

 year the snow lies round the monastery, and, of course, the climate is too 

 eold either for corn or fruit, but in the summer months, when strangers 

 commonly visit it, the bright green of the pastures, and the magnificent 

 size of the buildings, like a little habitable and humanized spot in the 

 midst of the forests and cliffs, form a scene not only most sublime, but 

 even cheerful and delightful. 



THEBES. 



The ancient city extended from the ridge of mountains which skirt the 

 Arabian Desert, to the similar elevation which bounds the valley of the 

 Nile on the west, being in circumference not less than twenty-seven 

 miles. The modern Egyptians, either with the view of obtaining 

 materials at little expense of labor, or in order that their hovels might be 

 secure from the periodical inundations of the river, are commonly found 

 to have built their villages on the ruins of an ancient temple or palace, 



