wells of streets, its want of side pavement,
and its loose bouldery trottoir—was rendered
still more irritating and uncomfortable by these
bands of proud exiles. You ran against them
at fruit-stalls, and at the corners of streets.
They gaped about, at the pearl-sewn slippers,
and the rich kincob stuff in the bazaars. In
their choleric pride, and their savage dauntless
bearing, they reminded me of how a Clan
Chattan man must have borne himself in
Edinburgh streets in the Flodden time. As for mere
Franks, they elbowed you and walked you down,
and claimed the wall, as insolently as the Turks.
They evidently thought a Circassian beggar a
more honourable being than an English Christian
in a cramped-up coat and ten horse-power
spectacles. Their pride did not hurt mine; they
did not tread on my corns, nor draw their daggers
on me; so I left them alone, and these English
knuckles of mine disturbed the symmetry of no
Circassian nose. I could pardon the pride of
a gentleman beggar. I pitied the brave exile,
and gave some of their children food.

Let us place ourselves on the queer, up-and-down,
hillocky bridge of boats, that joins Stamboul
to Galata: that wonderful bridge which has
four divisions, and which all day is crowded with
Turkish carriages, horsemen, beggars, Franks,
steam-boat passengers, sailors, boatmen, Greeks,
Crim-Tartars, Arabs, pedlars, water-sellers,
fruit-sellers, santons, fakirs, soldiers, and Turkish
women in sloppy yellow boots and quakery
dresses of crimson and gold—purple and
chocolate brown—Arabian Night silks. On one
side of the bridge, are lying the Bosphorus
steamers, snorting angrily at being kept waiting;
on the other, is the sort of latticed larder where
the shaven Turkish youth splash and bathe, with
much noisy laughter.

I pay my quarter-penny to one of the four or
five Turkish toll-takers; escape the clutch of the
horrible beggars, who squat in rows just beyond
the toll-taker's room, and who, baring
elephantiasis legs and hideous stumps, chant nasal
verses from the Koran, and hold out all day
little brass basins for alms; I escape a fat pasha's
overbearing Arab stallion; I dodge a gang of
asses laden with bricks and sweeping, switchy,
deal planks; I shun the importunities of a Solomon
Eagle kind of Indian fakir, with elf hair, and
insane hungry eyes, who swings about a huge
wooden sabot, suspended by a brass chain, for the
alms of the true believers. I avoid his verminy
robes and his flowing rags, and, wonderful to
relate, he neither pronounces the name of Sheitan
nor spits at me, for which I am thankful. I fly, too,
after some entanglement, from a wily Persian in
a high black cap, shaped like the mouthpiece of
a clarionet, in whose girdle I see some dozen
daggers stuck, for he is an itinerant trader in
arms. Then, resting for a moment my back
against the strong wooden balustrade of the
bridge, to observe the keen swift kyjiks poise
and skim over the Bosphorus, I turn to watch
an Arab water-seller, who is more than usually
Oriental. He is a tall, wiry man, from some
distant desert or palm-tree village, wild and
gaunt in look, and having more the abstracted
bearing of a devotee than the shrewd, anxious
look of the street trader. He has on his brown
nut of a head, the dirty green turban of a
pilgrim who has accomplished his religious course.
He is apparelled in a long tunic, that reaches from
his neck to his ankles, of stiff, brown, quilted
leather; and attached to his leather water-skin,
that he carries by a cord that goes round his
brown shrivelled neck, hang several brass bowls,
carved with Arabic talismans, and fringed with
brass spangles. Such a man, it seemed to me,
must have been Aladdin's wicked sham uncle;
such a man might be first cousin (twice removed)
to Sindbad's Old Man of the Sea, that troublesome
acquaintance, as difficult to shake off as
Horace's.

But, tired of the golden fire rain of the
vertical Eastern sun, the dangerous passage of horses
and arabas, the jostling of Turkish women who
delight to insult and generally inconvenience the
infidel; tired of being treated by every member of
the Turkish crowd, from the fat pasha down to the
leanest fig-seller, as if I were what nursery-maids
call " a naughty boy," and were to be snubbed,
and slapped, and put into the corner accordingly
—which, to an infidel, with what old writers call
a "high stomach," is rather difficult to bear;
I leave the bridge, " shunt to a siding," to use
a railway figure of speech, and passing the row of
bare, brawny-legged Greeks, who stand balancing
huge glass bottles, big as you see in chemists'
windows in England, on their left knees, and
tingling half a dozen tumblers in their thievish hands,
I steal off down the river-side street, and, passing
through a huge gateway, not unsentinelled,
leading to one of the quarters of the Turkish
city, I enter the quiet court-yard of a retired
mosque, and breathe there, far from bustle and
buzz.

And here let me step into the small side
chapel of a pardonable episode, and explain that
Constantinople is a noisy city, though its traffic
be small, and its population a poor handful in
comparison with our own black Babylon. There
is a sense of excitement and of dangerous
confusion in the deep defiles of streets which
fatigues the worried brain even more than
London. There are no rattling roulades of cabs,
no rolling thunder waggons of omnibuses, no
Juggernaut Pickford vans, no undeviating
hundred yard long coal-waggons, no bounding
Hansoms, with drivers the very fiery Ruperts
of London streets. No; but you scarcely gain
much when you have, instead, tormenting and
incessant Indian files of blundering, stolid,
over-laden asses, trailing along timber, or bruising you
with corded panniers full of bricks; noisy
fruit-sellers, bumping you with peach baskets;
water-carriers, laden with greasy oil skins; pashas
and their pipe-bearers, who respect no infidel
toes; jolting, suffering, grinding ox-waggons,
ponderous and slow; fiery, dashing black grooms,
regardless of Martin's Act; and bread-sellers,
with long-legged stands slung at their back,
which keep perpetually poking your eye out.

But, to my court-yard of the mosque, where