Donkeys may pass and bump against the
door-posts, thieves may run by (as I have seen
them), pursued by angry soldiers with drawn
and flashing sabres, the Sick Man himself may
ride past, sad, and hopeless, and felon-faced, with
the ambassadors he is so sick of—mortally sick
of—at his elbows, still, nothing moves our friend
in the decent, unruffled mushroom button of
a white or green turban. If a Job's
messenger were to come in and say that his thirty-
third wife was dead, or that fire from Allah had
burnt down his villa at Buyukdere, the most
Mustapha would do would be to fill his pipe
rather quicker than usual, and puffing a little
faster than usual, to tell his beads, and curse the
infidels all over the world.

A Turkish shopkeeper's goods never project
into the road; he has no outside counter, like our
vendors of old books; he has no old clothes and
regimentals fluttering obtrusively in a bankrupt,
suicide way at his outer doors. His little quiet
shop is flush with the roadside wall, and, sell he
mouthpieces of pipes, clogs for the bath-room, or
fez caps, they are all kept inside the little bin of
a shop, on the floor of which, and at the entrance
of which, sits the Turk, the master, with his red
slippers before him.

Tired of travellers' generalities, and really
wishing to paint truly, brightly, and minutely
what I see, I yet know scarcely how to convey a
thorough impression of Turkish shops. Whether
I will or no, I must do it partly by negatives.
They are not enormous cleared-out ground floors
of dwelling houses, as in London, but rather
cobbler-like, one-storied covered stalls, where
lurks a turbaned quiet man, aided by a black-
eyed Greek, or fat brown Armenian boy, who,
to prevent the good phlegmatic man using his
legs, get down from shelves, or from the inner
vaulted bin, the striped silks, the sandal wood
beads, the aloes wood, the hippopotamus hide
whips, the spongy bath towels, or whatever it
may be you want.

You could, I found, hardly imagine a man
going to cheat you who was in no hurry to get
down his gold striped cloths, who requested
you to tuck up your legs on his counter, who sent
out for lemonade or sherbet, or called for pipes and
coffee. I used always to think, when I coiled
myself up to buy some small trifle (a little red pipe
bowl, or a pair of slippers, starred with seed
pearl), that Mustapha treated me more like some
bearded Arabian merchant who had come to
spend a month with him, than a "loafing"
infidel, who was in a burning hurry, and had only
a sovereign or two to spend. But when that
venerable and majestic Turk, sitting with his
red slippers before him, began to ask me exactly
two hundred times the worth of that pipe and
those slippers, my respect for the trading
instincts of the patriarchal old bearded humbug
increased tremendously, though I knew he longed
to spit in my coffee, and to football my unshorn
head up and down the knubbly street.

But I cannot describe Turkish shops and
enable readers to decide what age of civilisation
they belong to, unless I also describe the streets
that lead to them and from them, that face them,
that back them, that bring them customers,
that lame the said customers they lake away.
In like manner as the nineteenth century Turk
is one and the same with the Turk of the
seventeenth century, so are the Stamboul streets
of I860 much what the Stamboul streets must
have been in 1660. Drive the Turk back to-
morrow to his Asian tent, and he would be as
fit for it as ever he was. Turn him out to-morrow
from the city he stole from Christianity,
and you will find the same streets that you
would have found when Busbequius or Grelot
visited Turkey—no better, no worse. In fact,
cramp a Moslem in Paris boots till corns spring
out all over him, pinch his brown fists in Jouvin's
white kid gloves, squeeze him in invisible green
Yorkshire cloth, scent him, eye-glass him, grease
him, uniform him as you like, the Turk will
still remain the unimprovable Chinaman of the
world, his religion a dangerous lie, his polygamy
detestable, every country he governs a dunghill
or a desert. I longed to tell Mustapha so, when
he used to sit stolid and divinely contemptuous
if I came in a hurry for some tufted Broussa
bath towels, upon which I know he would have
bowed and wished me peace, believing that I was
complimenting him in my own tongue. I never
could have been angry, however, with Mustapha,
unless he had actually struck me or called me
"dog," because, however cheating he is, he is
such a gentleman, with his mildness and his
courtesy; he never does anything ludicrous, or
gauche, or intrusive, or fussy, or vulgar; he is
never pert, never pompous, but looks like
Abraham and Jonah, and Isaac and Jacob, and
King Solomon all in one. He seems to be
incapable of fret or worry, and when he dies it
will be, I am sure, without a struggle, for he was
never fully awake yet.

As to the streets that lead to other shops
than Mustapha's. In the first place, they
are as narrow as Shoe-lane, yes, even that
Regent-street of Constantinople which leads to
St. Sophia, or the Piccadilly that branches on to
the Hippodrome, is a mere rough path; and
Stamboul being, like Home, a city of Seven
Hills, half its lanes are five times as steep as
Holborn-hill, London. They have no smooth slabs
of side pavement, no kerbs, no lamps, no names,
no guarding side-posts. They are covered with
what is merely a jolting mass of boulder stones
thrown down loose as when uncarted, or if
sound trottoir for a few yards, in another step
or two ground into holes or crushed into
something like a stonemasons' yard, or a pebbly sea
beach bristly with geological specimens. If a
barricade had just been pulled down, and not yet
levelled, so would it look; if it were the street of
a mountain village, so would it be. As in the
days of Adam, and before Macadam was thought
of, so are the streets still.

To ladies impossible, to men terrible, imagine,
plus, these torrent beds of streets, mountain
defiles after an inundation, or a landslip
avalanche of shingle, continuous stream
of ox-carts, water-carriers and oil-carriers, ass