with gold. I drive it on trial through a half-
crown at one dig. The ripple-mark all over it
shows it to be good stuff, if not pure Damascus.
So at least I think, until night, when, producing
it in triumph after dinner at Misseri's, I am
told that such spear-heads are made by thousands
in Russia to send to Persia, where they
are fitted to cane staves, and used for wild-boar
hunting. I also buy a kind of rough butcher's
knife with an ivory handle, which I despise, but
with which a learned Nimrod at Misseri's cuts
two pennies through without injuring the edge,
and with which he tells me, if he had a fair slash,
he could separate a wild dog at one blow.

Zohrab, the sword-merchant next door, dazzles
my volatile imagination with a lathy yataghan
in a red velvet sheath, which, I am
told, belonged once to nobody less than the.
Pasha of Tripoli. It is very top-heavy and
awkward to me, but I learn that its use does not
depend on main force, but on legerdemain, and
that one razor-like shave of it, outwards and then
inwards, will move off a man's head (provided
the man is willing) as gently and neatly as you
can tip off a wild rose-shoot with a riding-whip.
Zohrab next tries to inflict on me, a bundle of
hide whips and a Janissary's helmet. Here I
must pause to say that the Cid himself, or
Scanderbeg, or Kara George of Servia, could not
have worn a more chivalrous and artful head
covering. It consisted of a steel cap, spiked
at top, and worked so skilfully for lightness
that it was not thicker than a cocoa-nut-shell
cup. It bore over the brow, a legend from the
Koran, worked in gold, and on one side of the
spike was a tube to receive the plume that its
proud Janissary owner must have carried through
the flaming torrent of many a Hungarian battle.
From the edge of this steel cap, which was
padded thick and soft on the inside with red
velvet now faded to yellow, fell a finely woven
steel tippet, strong enough to keep out an
inquisitive sword-blade, but worse than powerless
before the almond-shaped rifle bullet, that,
driving into a wound a link or two of this artful
steel, would render the injury mortal, and past
all probing. Then I was tempted with a sort
of chocolate frother of steel, and with a double
battle-axe with a dagger in the handle, and
other charitable inventions of no commercial
utility.

But I had been a month in Constantinople,
yet had no fez; that must be remedied. A Jew
tout, one Barsabas by name, guided me to
the fez store. I have white muslin to buy
to wind round my fez, and keep off the
pertinacious sun.

"In the name of the Prophet, fezes!" "My
lord shall be obeyed. England is a paradise,
its people are all sultans, and do as seemeth
them good."

The dealer slips his hand, accurately as a
compositor's, into a pigeon-hole; he draws out a
bundle of fezes, folded flat, one tucked in the other.
They are of all shades of red, from peony crimson
to poppy scarlet, carnation colour, and the
hue of a boiled lobster's shell. At the top of
each there is a little stalk, Chinese in effect,
where the full blue tassel is to be bound. He
tries one on, hands me a mirror, and falls back
as does Barsabas the Jew tout, in sudden
spasms of delight, wonder, and astonishment.
I look a son of war; it fits me as if I had been
a true Mussulman all my life. It is worth,
however, three shillings, and he asks me ten.
Barsabas wrangles, with anger and vexation, but
only to keep up appearances, for he is
accustomed to help Franks to bazaar goods at three
hundred times their real value. A man with
water-skins passing, stops to smile—at which I
feel flattered; a raisin-water vendor puts down
his tins and gives advice; the dealers all round
whisper and laugh together, as much as to say,
"How that villain Achmed is plundering that
miserable infidel! Allah!"

I buy it, however, resolutely; it fits my head
like a skin. I give two shillings for nine penny-
worth of muslin with gilt fuzzy ends, and twist
them Levantwise round my frizzling brains.
Barsabas, who has been twiddling for some time a
diplomatic cigarette, now hands it me. I am,
indeed, tied and bound in the hands of the
Philistines. Still I am lucky, for I have only
been slapped once to-day, and spat at twice. I
am thirsty and lame, and have been environed
by dogs several times. I feel my liver out of
order, and I have been much cheated, otherwise
I have spent a pleasant Turkish day; though
rather plagned by Jews and tormented by guides.

I have come across several old Oriental
customs too: for instance, that grated window
of the dervish's tomb, where the votive bits
of rag tied to the bars fluttered so strangely;
then, the khan with the yard full of skins of
Syrian tobacco; and the mosque where the
porter was praying at the door, while the priest
was throwing seed by handfuls to the courtyard
pigeons.

Now, I plunge out into the sunshine again,
feeling as if I had suddenly emerged from a
cave tomb, and dive down another vaulted
tube, which is also a bazaar; but of what?
pearls of Ormuz, silks of Samarcand? No;
but nutmeg-graters, and candlesticks, and
Cheap John Birmingham gridirons, half of them
evidently such as my country has reason to
be proud of producing. Turning back, half
frightened at this romance-dispelling vision, I
take Barsabas and bid him strike out through
the streets for the Egyptian or drug bazaar,
staying to look for a moment at a neat ivory
spoon shop, and at a goldbeater's, where men
beat at little books, from whose red pages oozes
gold leaf, drossy and crumpling like sensitive
plants at the air.

Now, because I do not people the bazaar
defiles with any one but myself, Barsabas,
Zeuope, Zohrab, or the other dealers I have
patronised, you must not suppose that from
early morning, when the gates open, till four
o'clock, when they shut, this city under cover
is not crowded, for it is. It is choke-full all
day, as Cheapside when the counting-houses are
closing. Black slaves, eunuchs, yellow-booted