to ascertaining next how the servants had been
passing their time.

"Have you been suffering much from the
heat, down stairs?" I asked.

"No, miss," said the girl; " we have not
felt it to speak of."

"You have been out in the woods, then, I
suppose?"

"Some of us thought of going, miss. But
cook said she should take her chair into the cool
court-yard, outside the kitchen door; and, on
second thoughts, all the rest of us took our
chairs out there, too."

The housekeeper was now the only person
who remained to be accounted for.

"Is Mrs. Michelson gone to bed yet?" I
inquired.

"I should think not, miss," said the girl,
smiling. " Mrs. Michelson is more likely to be
getting up, just now, than going to bed."

"Why? What do you mean? Has Mrs.
Michelson been taking to her bed in the
daytime?"

"No, miss; not exactly, but the next thing
to it. She's been asleep all the evening, on the
sofa in her own room."

Putting together what I observed for myself
in the library and what I have just heard from
Laura's maid, one conclusion seems inevitable.
The figure we saw at the lake, was not the figure
of Madame Fosco, of her husband, or of any of
the servants. The footsteps we heard behind
us, were not the footsteps of any one belonging
to the house.

Who could it have been?

It seems useless to inquire. I cannot even
decide whether the figure was a man's or a
woman's. I can only say that I think it was a
woman's.

THE BAZAARS OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

THE word bazaar came to us from the Magi's
country, and the English bazaar in its shape and
character and purpose, is Eastern from top to
toe. In Stamboul as in London, a bazaar means
an arcaded covered walk, lined on either side with
shops. To convey the character of the Turkish
bazaar as definitely as I could to an Englishman, or
a Londoner—which is the same thing a little
narrowed—I should describe it as in build not
unlike a metropolitan arcade, with the shop
fronts taken off, the shops themselves
narrowed into open-air cobblers' stalls, and piled
round with bales of goods, in the centre of which
sits the bearded Turks who own them. The bazaar
of Turkey has nothing in common, however, with
such places as the Pantheon in Oxford-street,
London, except that, like that, it is a cluster of
shops, collected under one all-embracing roof:
there intended to keep out the sun, here to keep
the rain out.

The bazaars are also unlike ours in this, that
they are divided into districts or parishes of
trades; the jewellers keep far from the
armourers, the silk merchants from the henna
sellers, the fez makers from the slipper vendors.
The same practice of guild subdivision extends
even outside the gates of the bazaar, for, now you
find yourself deafened by the clattering violence
of the coppersmiths' street, and now you stroll
into a district of clog-makers or confectioners.

I hardly know what originated this old
Eastern custom. It must have been of early
origin, for, looking back on England, one
finds that Saxon-London had its Bread and Milk
streets, its Corn hill, and its Fish street "birds
of a feather." We suppose early advantages of
propinquity and aid, and, above all, the mediaeval
necessities and jealous secrets of guild association,
sent our Jews to Old Jewry, our clothes-
men to Holywell-street, our money-lenders to
Lombard-street, our clothiers to Watling-street,
our butchers to Newgate-street, and our weavers
to Spitalfields. In large cities, this classification
makes shopping more easy, and in troubled
times' of Janissary revolt, bales of silk, Persian
sapphires, and such valuables, were scarcely ever
safe outside the iron gates of the bazaar.

But let us get out of the intolerable sun and
off the laming street, and enter the bazaar:
round which a perfect irregular cavalry regiment
of hack Turkish horses and their impudent boy
grooms are clustered, with some ugly veiled
women, some blacks, a Hindoo fakir, an Arab,
half a dozen Greeks, an Armenian, and some
black slave's, who, to judge by their great
boxfuls of white teeth, are in a condition to laugh
at dentists for many a long masticating year.

A low stone archway, the cumbrous iron doors
now flung back, admits us to the busy
labyrinthine world of the bazaars—quite a small city of
shops, with streets crossing and recrossing, with
fountains, coffee-shops, street vendors of its own.
Stop here a day, and you will see all the
routine of Turkish life gone through: periodical
prayer, religious ablutions, buying, selling, love-
making, quarrels, thieving, eating. To many
hundred Turks these walls are all they ever see
of the world. One day a death spasm will seize
them, they will turn pale and die, and the next night
be run off with to the place of cypresses and
forgotten; the day after, a new beard and pipe will
reign over the little open shop. So the wheel
spins round.

Before I go and buy a handful of pearl seed,
a jaunty fez, a Persian pen-case, or aloes
wood to fume in my chibouk, let me warn the
reader against thinking that all here is cloth of
gold and silver, or that "gemmed daggers" and
"jewelled hilts" strew the ground, or that the
pearls are in sacks, or the diamonds in pailfuls,
as some dazzled travellers of thirty years ago
describe the place. Why, the great bossy gold
cups and gigantic salvers of a London jeweller's
window would outshine all you see in a Turkish
bazaar put together. I suppose the false
glamour that Byron threw over Eastern wealth
gives rise to the tone in which Englishmen
get in the habit of talking of everything
Oriental. What delighted me in the bazaars
was not the splendour of the merchandise,
but rather the unusual aspect of everything,