over by the Turkish police, who, in blue tunics,
red fezes, and white trousers, sneak about
rather ingloriously, saving for the ornamented
holster at their belt, in which their pistols
lurk.

It is not possible to go up a Turkish street,
if it contain any shops, without also finding
among them a furniture shop, where Chinese-
looking stools and large chests are sold, their
whole surface diced over with squares of
mother-of-pearl, frequently dry and loose with
extreme age. They are now, we believe, rather
out of fashion in the palaces on the Bosphorus.

But these are the first-rate streets in the
lower alleys. Round the gates of the Golden
Horn side of the city, down by the timber stores
and the fish-market, the shops are mere
workshops, and alternate with mere sheds, and with
rooms full to the very door with shining millet
or sesame, which looks like caraway seed; with
charcoal stores, and fruit-stands where little
green peaches are sold, the true Turk preferring
raw fruit to ripe.

In these lower Thames-street sort of
neighbourhoods—in winter knee-deep in mud, and in
summer almost impassable for traffic, towards
the Greek quarter especially—you are sure to
find a comb-shop, a little place about as large
as four parrots' cages, where an old ragged
Turk and a dirty boy are at work, straightening
crooked bullocks' horns by heat, sawing them into
slices, chopping them thinner and thinner, and
cutting out the coarse teeth. The workman,
powdered with yellow horn dust, perhaps stops
now and then to drink from the red earth jug
that is by his side, or deals with a mahabiji,
or street sweetseller, for that delicious sort of rice
blancmange he sells—yellow all through,
powdered with white sugar, and eaten with a brass
spoon of delightfully antique shape; or, he is
discussing a shovelful of burnt chesnuts; or, a
head of maize boiled to a flowery pulp, eaten with
a ring of bread, and washed down with a draught
from the nearest fountain; or he is stopping, the
patriarch master being away, to listen to the
strains of an itinerant Nubian, who stands under
a mosque wall yonder, with a curious banjo slung
round his black neck, the handle a big knotted
reed, the body large as a groom's sieve and of the
same shape. Some black female servants are near,
also listening, and I can tell from what African
province they are by the scars of the three gashes
that, as they think, adorn their left cheeks.
Close to where they stand, perhaps, is a shop
full of fleas and pigeons, the latter always
hustling about and cooing, and evidently on
sale.

But shall I forget the tobacco shops that are
incessant, that are everywhere; upon the hills
and down by the water, round St. Sophia and close
even to the Sublime Porte itself? In England,
I have always from a boy envied two tradesmen,
the one the cabinet-maker, the other the ivory-
turner; the one, dealing with such a dainty
material; the other, so dexterous and refined in its
manipulations. In Turkey I always longed to
be either a jeweller or a tobacco merchant, the one
with a stock so portable and costly, the other
with a trade so much patronised yet requiring
so little apparatus. The tailor fags his eyes out,
but the tobacco merchant buys his skinfuls of
tobacco, or his leathern bagfuls of the Syrian
jibili, the patient hammal throws it down in
his shop, he buys a tobacco-cutter, a pair of
scales, a brass tiara of a tray to pile the
show samples up in, and there he sits and
smokes till a purchaser come. No heart-breaking
change, no docks to trudge to, no anything.
Nothing but to drag up brimming handfuls of
the saffron thread and to sell it by the oke,
trebling the price, of course, to an accursed
Frank. What did the Turks do (I often thought)
before smoking was invented? Did they play
at chess, cut off Christians' heads perpetually,
or murder their wives like Bluebeard, that
vulgar type of the Turk? What did they do
before coffee, on which they now seem to live,
sipping it all day, hot, and black, and thick,
tossing off grounds and all.

What is this shop, larger, wealthier, and
more European-looking than its fellows, into
which are now entering those three white-veiled,
nun-like Turkish ladies, who draw up their rich
silks of violet and canary colour quite above their
bright yellow shapeless boots? They go in and
sit down like so many children, on the low
four-legged rush-bottomed stools, so full of
mirth and mischief, that they agitate and distress
and delight the quiet Turkish sweetmeat-seller
and his black servant, who is steeping little
oval shelly pistachio nuts in a tin of melting
sugar and oil. The walls of the shop are hung
with long walking-sticks (cudgels, shall I say?)
of that precious and fragrant sweetmeat known
in hareems as "rahat li koum," or "lumps of
delight," which is a glutinous sort of jelly of a
pale lemon or rose colour, floured with sugar, and
knotted and veined with the whitest and curdiest
of almonds. It is a delicious, paradisaical, gluey
business, and horribly indigestible.

Those fair English friends of mine who nibble
at a fowl, and sip hesitatingly at a jelly, wishing
to be thought mere fragile angels who drink the
essence of flowers and live upon invalid spoonfuls
of the most refined delicacies, might derive
benefit from seeing Zobeide, Scheherazade, and
the fair Persian wives of that renowned pasha,
Dowdy Pasha, consume yards—yes, positively
yards—of those sweetmeat walking-sticks, washing
down the bane of digestion with plentiful
draughts of red-currant sherbet, raspberry sherbet,
and fresh-made lemonade duly iced.

Then, with a zeal worthy of a better cause,
forgetful of this morning's handfuls of rice and
fowl, and long greasy shreds torn with their own
fair ringers from a lamb roasted whole, how they
fall to on piles of sweet cakes, ending with a
few spadefuls of comfits, laughing and talking
all the time, and making light of the whole
affair! I wish I could here burst forth with
some scraps of Hafiz or Ferdusi, and tell how
warm and dark their antelope eyes were, and
how the lucid tinge of a summer daybreak lit their
cheeks. But, to tell truth, Zobeide was a whale