treadmill, no crank, there are no solitary cells.
Close to them is the Arsenal, where they work,
and where the Sultan has a pleasure kiosk paved
with marble, and shadowed with planes. Half the
prisoners are Greeks, and, according to Admiral
Slade and other thoughtful and reliable authorities,
are generally led to crime—particularly
murder—by the fiery raki sold in the spirit-
shops, kept by English subjects in defiance of
Mohammedan law. Altogether, it is a sorry sight
to see these murderers pigging together
unpunished, unimproved, rotting there, till released
bv earthly corruption, or by the great liberator,
Death.

As I turned to leave the modern Prometheus
—whom, for some touches of greatness in him, I
could not help pitying, in spite of some old freaks
of his with boiling oil, and the panic he spread
among Smyrniote merchants—I caught a glimpse
of the dim Greek chapel which is placed at the
end of a long passage of this horrible prison.
It was just a breath of blue incense—a glint
of light on the cord that held a faint yellow
oil-lamp, that struggled with the darkness—an
instant's glitter on some gilded pictures of saints
—and again the darkness hid it from my eyes,
in the heavy night of despair that gloomed
over the chained and torpid murderers. Those
glimpses, even of a superstitious faith, came to
me as kind words have come in moments of
suffering. They came to me as gentle flowers
seen smiling amid an Arctic winter.

Before anything more could be seen, we all
agreed that we must recruit our forces. The
doctor and the dragoman both knew of a
certain confectioner's near the Sublime Porte (an
actual gateway), where one might find refreshment.
After some painful experience of broken
pavement, rough as a torrent bed, we reached
the shop, and, seated on low stools, were waited
on by a black slave, who emerged from a back
oven cellar where he and his master were
tormenting a fire and forcing it to do their bidding
upon certain sugared almonds.

Recruited with cherry sherbet, Grimani,
armed with about a yard of "rahat likoum"
(lumps of delight), stuffed with pistachio-nuts,
and the doctor's pocket filled with scorched nuts,
we made straight for the Zaptie, or second prison
of Stamboul, and arrived, in a few streets, at
the door of the "house of detention" as the
Turkish word Zaptie means.

A few whispers at a grating, the unbolting of
a door, and we are in the prison. We pass
up a long passage, like the path to a livery
stable, through a double door, overlooked by
high walls, with barred apertures; where, I
believe, female prisoners once were detained. So
we reach the inner portal.

It is a dim vaulted-over doorway, dark
beyond all reach of sunlight. It is barred
up to the roof with huge wooden bars,
enclosing between them a sort of square room,
where the turnkeys sit and smoke, and where
tobacco-sellers come and display their goods
to the prisoners; this place opens by small
wickets, on one side, to the court-yard of the
prison: on the other side, to the entrance
passage I have just mentioned.

In this dismal giant's cage, such a crate as
an ogre might have kept his Christian knights
in to fatten against feast-day, were two or three
tame prisoners of high rank, and an itinerant
dealer or two, carelessly bragging of his goods,
and alternately singing scraps of Greek songs,
and stuffing packets of saffrony tobacco through
the wooden bars, as a young lady feeds her
canary-bird with eleemosynary lumps of sugar. A
few dirty sabres, hung up, were the only indications
of guard or durance, though the bars certainly
gave the place rather a wild-beast character.

I scarcely know who the favoured prisoners
were, who were sharing the turnkey's prerogatives
with quite a Macheath dignity, though
without the rollicking cavalierishness of that
highwayman: some pasha, for counterfeiting
state papers, I think, and some morally illogical
man, who had stolen something so grand that
it made a sort of state prisoner of him. As
for the turnkeys, they were more Turkish
and dressing-gowny than those of the Bagnio.
No white trousers here, no barrack-cleaned
sabres, no close-fitting red fezes with bunchy
blue tassels; rather, a general sponging-house
laxity and Arabian Nightishness; rather the air
of an amateur prison than of a government
stronghold; where all the lees of Stamboul were
dunghilled up into one reeking mass of infamy.

Does any reader remember a legend of some
early saint—one of those good men and vivacious
historians, who furnished our story-books for
many centuries with Jack the Giant-Killer
wonders—which relates how a wicked hermit, let
down through some Irish cavern into the infernal
regions, was kept there a day in a golden cage,
guarded by angels, while the devils of every
region of sin howled at him through the bars,
and clawed in at him, and poked at him, but
all in vain, with red-hot pitchforks, till night
came, and the white angels led him away again
in the darkness, to sneak to his hermit cell and
vegetable soup, a better and a leaner man?

Well, something like that caged bird of a
saint I felt, as I stood in that probationary
paddock, shut in like a Smithfield prize ox, and
stared at by those hideous Turkish faces, now
mocking at us, now threatening us; the foreman
(a wretch with a sore mouth and one eye)
occasionally pointing at us, then turning round
and shouting some joke, which made the mob of
thieves and murderers roar again, like a band of
laughing hyænas arranging a night attack on an
Arab encampment.

Now, at a signal, the big bolts grind back, the
wicket opens narrowly—cautiously—and a rush of
the turnkeys drives back the villanous crowd, and
they are shut within a second enclosure: the door
of which is kept by a gaunt gigantic negro, who,
with stern cruel eyes, and laughing hideous
mouth, chides and scolds the rabble into silence,
and stands, with the handle of the latch in his
hand, ready to let out any special prisoner we
choose to call for.

I was anxious, naturally, to know if, any