square coop of some forty barn-door fowls,
met me full butt, and, regardless of all
shilling "books of etiquette," drove me, whether
I would or no, against wall or into shop, or
down side alley, anywhere and everywhere
roaring out, with the brazen lungs (peculiar
to porters, the Turkish caution, "Sakin!"
take care), or the lingua franca one, Guardia
the final a being prolonged to a sort of howl
half warning, half threatening. Add to this a
swarm of mounted Turkish pashas and their
insolent attendants, Frank nursemaids, Greek
priests, Roman Catholic padres, sisters of mercy
in white-winged head-dresses, cosmopolite
couriers, loathsome beggars, dwarfs, eunuchs,
soldiers, and itinerant salesmen, and you have
some small idea of what hindrances meditation
meets with, in the perpendicular sweltering
street leading from Galata below, to Pera above.

What were the real causes, my readers will
want to know, of the great conspiracy brewing
at the very time when I planted my foot in the
ancient city, whose people are corpses, whose
faith is fossilised, and whose Sultan is a mummy?
I will try to explain them.

I am a slow-blooded man myself, but I have
my boiling point. As certainly as at so many feet
up a mountain the mosses change into perpetual
snow, so certainly has every man this boiling
point. Nations, too, have their boiling point,
as kings and tyrants have learnt long before
this, to their bitter cost. It was that very boiling
point of impatient suffering that Turkey
had just reached, and that was why that
enchanted morning when I first set foot on the
wooden bridge of Constantinople, so many thousand
brown and busy hands were busily employed
in the dark, in

THE TWISTING OF THE GREEN BOWSTRING.

That was why in great barrack khans frosty-
faced grim Circassians, and in matted convent
rooms absorbed-looking dervishes, were twisting
so busily that foggy morning when, hearty
and cheerful, I shouldered my way to the house
that is set on a hill; that was why the little
sinewy bowstring was then twisting by a thousand
hands in horse-bazaar, in cemetery, among
turbaned tombstones, by defaced monuments of
Janissaries, on shipboard under tarred awnings,
in cafés, in dim shops, in gardens away
by ruined aqueducts, among the very galley
slaves themselves, as, with the malice of hell
upon their hideous faces, they cluster round the
post to which their great master, the Smyrniote
murderer Katerji, is chained like a Prometheus,
muttering and balancing their ponderous chains
as future weapons in their devilish hands. The
city that morning, could I but have seen below
the surface, was like one great factory, where
thousands of hands were employed in twisting a
green bowstring. If you could have seen their
quiet, stealthy faces, and the cold, fatalist smile
that moved lip and brow, you would have thought
it was some religious red cordon of honour they
were weaving and plaiting for the descendant
of the Prophet, instead of the death cord.

They had wrongs—deep wrongs—these Turkish
people, and that simmering froth that foretold
boiling over, did not arise in the great Turkish
pot without a reason. There were two classes of
malcontents: the European party, who could get
no reforms introduced, owing to the Sultan's
debauched apathy and sottish selfishness; the
old Mussulman party, who were horrified and
alarmed at their miserable Sardanapalus becoming
the tool and puppet of insolent, foreign, infidel,
stiff-legged, stiff-backed old ambassadors,
and who attributed all to Allah's anger at the vices
and godless open wine-bibbing of the Imbecile
who spent his time in building card houses, and
throwing his country's gold into the foundation
pits of new palaces. These two armies of
conspirators, meeting at some cross-road of joint
sympathy, seem to have been there recruited by
a third party of neutrals, less abstract men,
who had to complain bitterly of over-taxes
wasted on royal extravagance, of wronged
women, of wine hateful to the Prophet, of
wicked and base-born favourites, of frontier
lines neglected, of a navy decaying to a toy fleet,
of cruelty, crime, and misrule, of pashas
overpaid for putting provinces to the rack for
money, of revenue wasted in collecting, and of
a thousand other small evils springing up daily
like poisonous seeding fungi on the dead trunk
of a fallen oak.

To swell these three allied bands, poured
in a great, bloodthirsty, fierce, irrestrainable,
unreasoning, armed mob of soldiers, complaining
of eight months' pay owing; and, at the back of
these, conspicuous in their high, white-wool
caps, came some thousands of exiled Circassians,
driven from their country on the surrender
of their great saint, hero, and chieftain
Schamyl, and now starving in the streets of
Stamboul for want of the miserable stipend
promised, but never given them, by the
fool Sultan, the guilty misruler of an angry
and resentful nation. On the banners of
all these united rebels was to have been
blazoned the cry, "Give us a responsible government!"
but I fear that the wild rabble at the
back of these standard-bearers, of these venerable,
snow-bearded priests and grave, religious men,
might, in a moment of heat, revenge, and
forgetfulness, have rashly used the green bowstring
that had been so long a twisting. No doubt, as
in all revolutions, there was, too, a blood party,
who wished to convince their enemies by cutting
their throats. So much the worse for the foreman
of the state, who had received such good
wages for such bad work. A bad king is a
dishonest servant, and should be driven out as
such, and will be whenever his people grow wise
enough: for royalty is an expensive luxury, and
all we men like our money's worth.

As for the massacre of the Christians, it
was never dreamed of, and the rumour must
have arisen from the mere discovery of many of
the violent Mahommedan and fanatic party in
the plot. The object of those men was the object
for which our own fathers fought so well and so
bravely at Naseby and at Culloden against John