I had done what Rockett called "the proper
thing;" that is, had taken a caïque on. the
Wooden Bridge ; skipping gingerly along its
sharp, narrow, covered end, knowing that one
inch awry I should be in the water, I reached
the seat, and then letting myself quietly drop
into the sort of well, or " cradle," as the boatmen
called it, smuggled myself comfortably into
the cushion-lined box, and called out in Turkish,
"To the Scutari barracks" (Kyakji effendim),
"Mr. Boatman !" and off we went.

A moment took the stalwart boatman to
adjust his oars, by a greased leather loop, to the
rowlock pegs; then, poising the curious oars, the
upper parts of which are as large and oval as
small skittle-pins, he flew over the blue
Bosphorus with me, bearing straight to the cliff on
whose top the English tombstones shine like
beacons.

In due time, that half-mile or so of blue
water was passed by my silk-shirted Palinurus,
and, paying him so many great copper piastres,
I leaped on the little plank jetty, where I found
some Turkish boys watching a stalwart black
diving. Asking them my way, and so learning it,
I scrambled across the grooved sloping tramway
of a caïque-builder's, and made along the narrow
strip of shore that underlies the crumbling
earthcliffs of Scutari—the barrack-side of the town.
It was delicate walking, for the earth sloped very
close to the black shell-less pebbles of the beach,
and the miserly water washed high up to meet
those boulders and coloured stones and drag
them back to submarine hiding-places.

The walk was pleasant, on one side, because I
could see the city gleaming in the distance, and
the breath of the sea was bracing and fresh in
that torrid climate; but, on the other hand, it
was not pleasant, for here and there a sluggish
black stream treacled down the cliff, or poured
through some self-worn channel, in a way that
would have made the Thames—the grandmother
of all sewers, past, present, and to come—burst
its banks with envy.

I was trying to quiet the scruples of my
offended nose, and I was wondering what strangled
pashas and headless wives might not, fifty years
ago, have been washed up on this noisome shore,
where nothing but the wild barren gourd grew,
and where the ground was strewn with dead
star-fish, when my eyes, looking upward from
the beach, ran twenty yards off, and there fell,
with alarm and horror, upon the carcase of a
dead horse, upon which a band of wild dogs were
feeding as busily as aldermen at a charity dinner
on a haunch of venison. They were tugging,
and peeling, and riving, as energetically as
lawyers on Chancery property, unanimous as
swindling directors, silent as gluttons at a feast.
They scarcely looked up to see who was coming:
poachers and wreckers work not so industriously.
I should have believed that they had not
dined for a month before, for they were slaving
like shipwrights working overtime the night
before a launch. I knew not which dog's
energy most to admire: whether he of the
tanning, or he of the zoological: he of the
anatomical, or he of the physiological department.
It was a labour of love to them, and
they went at it tooth and nail.

Some of the wretches were nuzzling their
gory heads in the scooped-out stomach;
others were tugging angrily at the crimsoning
mane, to get at the choicer morsels beneath.
Others were stripping up the hide over the
flank and thigh, with loathsome dexterity,
and a few of the more timid, frightened by
warning bites, and scared by ommous growls,
were digging their sharp and hungry teeth into
the distant legs and the long sinewy neck. The
carrion-vulture gorging himself on a dead
swollen ox, is horrible to see, but this cried
out to me: "You infidel, you are in a new
country, where life has no high value, and where
death has new terrors." Making a long détour,
so as to outflank this public dinner, I passed on,
inward and upward, to the stony street that
leads to the hospital of Florence Nightingale.

Only the next day, as I strolled through an
almost disused part of the "Petit Champ des
Morts," as the French of Pera playfully call
the old Turkish burial-ground, through which
their lively chief promenade runs, I looked
among the tombs around me, and saw a
grave, immediately facing where I stood, that
had lately fallen in, just as a badly baked pie might
do at the first shivering touch of the knife. As the
Turks are not civilised enough yet, to boast of
resurrection-men, and as their doctors are not
so studious of death's secrets as to give even
one farthing for dead Turks, whether murdered
for the purpose or not, I began to wonder for a
moment what had led to this yawning aperture.
But, when I instantly remembered that poor
Turks are buried without coffins, only laths or
light hoop-wood being placed to keep the earth
from pressing uncomfortably on the pale man,
I ceased to wonder. The body decays, the
earth, unless renewed, falls in; and what leads
to this ghastly and alarming accident still more,
is, that the Turks are in the habit of leaving a
hole communicating from the body to the upper
air. The edge of this tube the sun chaps, and
the crack, running downwards at once, levers up
the baked clay.

I was turning away, wondering what horror
would next meet my eyes in this strange
country, when lo! the ground gaped and
cracked wider, and, from the dark loathsome little
cave toddled upwards, winking to the light, a little
wild dog-pup, his yellowish hair still almost
down; and before I had done wondering at finding
the poor man's grave turned into a kennel, up
toddled, screeching feebly, yelping, and rolling
now and then on their backs, four others of the
same breed; the respected mother of the family
refusing to appear, and remaining in her
unfragrant, subterranean drawing-room.

I had been told so much about these wild
dogs which I found untrue, that I began to
disbelieve in the capability of the ordinary
human eye of seeing, or even wishing to see,
anything exactly as it was. For instance, at the
table of Miss Bendy, the old maid said the