of a woman, and was ruddled, not merely painted,
with rouge; the fair Persian had Indian ink
eyebrows, joining architecturally over her nose;
and Scheherazade was white as a wall with
smears of paint that marred her once pretty
nose and dimpling mouth. As soon as they
were trotted off in their little pea-green and gilt
carriage, guardian negress and all, I went into
the shop, about which I had all this time been
loafingly prowling, and called, clapping my
hands, for some violet sherbet; because Mussulman
tradition distinctly tells us that that great
Arab epicure and sensualist, Mohamed, called
this his favourite beverage. And now do I greatly
desire to tell my readers all about the flavour
and fragrance of that well and euphoniously
named drink; only one thing prevents me, and
that is, that my Turk did not sell it, and no one
else that I could find out ever did, so I did not
taste it, and cannot compare it to all sorts of
things as I should otherwise decidedly have
done.

Wine and spirits would not be sold at all in
Stamboul—at least openly—but that British
subjects claim that privilege of sale. Raki, a sort of
fiery oily anisette, peculiarly deleterious, is drunk
with great relish by the Greeks, and by those
Turks who are lax in their religious observance,
whenever they can get it unobserved. I am afraid
that tying down poor human nature with
unnecessary restraints makes sad hypocrites of man,
who find it difficult enough to keep even the great
laws, and are always inventing some excuse to slip
off Nature's handcuffs. I remember particularly
one fresh bright morning that I was on the deck
of a Turkish steamer that was ploughing through
the Sea of Marmora, and just sighting the
Seven Towers, beyond which the cypresses and
minarets were rising in a great watchful army,
guarding the crescented domes of the still
sleeping city. The deck was strewn with
Albanians in their hairy capotes, with slavish-looking
thievish Greeks, and with Turks grave and
cross-legged on their prayer-carpets. Here and
there, seated on the benches, were two or three
half Europeanised Turks, attempting cumbrously
to imitate the ribald ease of their Greek friends.
Threading the still half-sleeping groups, stepped
the cafegee of the boat with thimble cups of
smoking black coffee (half grounds as the Turks
drink it) on his dirty trays. A Greek, in crimson
jacket and black worsted lace broidery all over
it, suddenly produces an old medicine bottle
full of raki, and passes it round. His Greek
friends drink and look religiously thankful, for
the autumn morning is raw. Three times—nay,
four times—he smiles, and offers it to the Turk,
who looks away over the boat-side coquettishly.
There is a curious constraint in the way he
pushes the bottle from him: so Cæsar pushed
the crown, according to the envious Cassius;
so Cromwell did not push aside the bottle, if
Cavalier squibs be true. There is a thoughtful,
spurious look about his eye, changing, with
the rapidity of a juggler's trick, to a quiet look
of content and triumph, as he suddenly accepts
the bottle, and slipping behind a fat Greek, takes
an exhaustive slope of its contents. What this
man did with hypocritic reluctance, hundreds
did—as I was very well assured—without any
reluctance at all, under the protection and shelter
of a European's roof. They feel the prohibition is
absurd; they know the Sultan has bartered his
very throne for a champagne flask, as his father
did before him; so, secretly they drink and
are drunken. Indeed, I was told that the more
philosophical Turks consider champagne merely
a sort of heavenly bottled beer: in the first
place, because it froths, which Eastern wine
does not; secondly, because it is of a dull
yellow colour, when their wine is red. Besides,
as long as nations choose the wisest, and bravest,
and best of their nation for monarch, must they
not follow his example, and (saving the Prophet)
get wisely, bravely, and in the best and most
secret way possible, drunk from pure loyalty?

People have often laughed at Chateaubriand's
French dancing-master giving soirées to the
Dog-rib Indians, and a better subject for a farce
could scarcely be conceived; but all
incongruous things are ridiculous, when, they are not,
on the one hand, also hateful, or, on the other,
when they do not excite our pity. So, apropos of
raki, and the Turkish rakes who drink it, I must
describe the small English tavern that I
stumbled into just outside the Arsenal walls. It
was kept by a Greek, and was in the Greek
manner; but I found it was specially patronised
by the English mechanics whom the Sultan keeps
to superintend the government manufactories.
These intensely English men, of course despising
sherbet, which they profanely and almost
insultingly called "pig's-wash," and detesting
raki because it was the secret beverage of " them
precious villains of Turks," resorted to this grimy
hostelrie, dirtier than the meanest village inn in
"dear old England," to wash the steel filings
from their throats and the sawdust from their
lips, with real expensive, oily, bilious, "old
Jamaikey"—so old that the red and green labels
on the bottles were brown and fly-blown—and
with "Hollands," in square, black-green, high-
shouldered Ostade bottles. It was delightful
to see the brave, cross-grained, grumbling fellows
lamenting English climate and English taxes,
cursing the Turks, and wishing they were in
Wessex and Double Gloucester again, "with all
their hearts;" to see them turning up their
sleeves, and hammering on the table for more
grapes and more rum; and to hear them shouting out,
"It's my delight, on a shiny night,"
and "Don't rob a poor man of his beer," and
discussing, with absurd eagerness, six-months-
old English news—reforms long since become
law, and treaties long since broken.

I have heard, indeed, that in the days of
Mahmoud (the stern father of Abdul Medjid,
"the fainéant"), that despotic Turk who
destroyed the Janissaries, and introduced European
reforms into Turkey, these bibulous friends
of mine had rather a risky and troublesome
time of it, for they stood upon their dignity as
Britons, got feverish British beer into their
brave wrong-headed brains, and were once or