with another man, who carried in a leather skin,
some curious brown liquid of a nutty flavour,
and a medicinal colour. Not a street further,
and I was found, from sheer high spirits and
sociability, discussing prices with an old Turk,
who carried about some sort of golden gummy
sweetmeat, in a round tin pan, much patronised.

I had just escaped the fierce Mamaluke charge
of a wild Nubian eunuch, who, mounted on an
entire Syrian horse, was dashing him up the
street at such a lathering pace, that it sent the
fire out of the stones like the running twinkle
that at lamp-lighting hour you see spreading
in the distance up Piccadilly. Whether he was
trying to kill the horse or to sell him, I don't
know, but the only thing I had ever seen like it
before, in a decent city, had been a London
butcher's boy, spurring with food to a starving
family in May Fair, and a young doctor gigging
it at an express-train velocity, to convey an idea
to a passing coroneted barouche of the vast
extent of his practice.

Thanking Allah for this deliverance, I stopped
a moment among the stalls crowded with old
saddles, bits, and bridles of the Horse Bazaar
(Aat Bazaar), meditating over the numerous
reminiscences that abound there of our blundering
prodigality during the Crimean war. I stayed
to see, at the call of prayer, one of the most
rascally of the dealers, prostrate himself, and go
through his ceremonies with all the formality
of the incumbent of Saint Barabbas on the vigil
of St. Simony; just as I was breaking from
this nest of sharking traders, and resisting
pressing offers to buy a fat Syrian sheep with a
fleshy apron of tail some two feet broad, I
started, because, at the foot of a bread-seller's
stall, I saw a sight as horrible to me as if
Coleridge's nightmare, Death in life, had stepped
from behind a curtain, and seized me by the
throat.

And yet it was only a little yellow shrivelled
old Turk with opiated eyes, Whitby jet without
the polish, who sat cross-legged before a little
three-legged wooden stand on which was laid a
dead man's arm. It was the mendicant's own arm
evidently, or at least I could see he claimed it by
the quiet look of triumph he gave when he saw
my involuntary start. He felt an intellectual
satisfaction in seeing the bird go into the trap,
the more so, as he himself had with some
pains made the trap, and at some personal
sacrifice supplied the bait I now saw laid
horizontally on the jammed and bruised
English tea-tray that stood on the little altar of a
tripod. Like an experienced fisherman, he gave
me time to gorge before he struck. He had
missed often, I dare say, from striking too soon,
while the hook still vibrated suspiciously only
about the fish's lips; he would now strike home
when he struck, so he prayed to Allah, saying:

"May Allah grant it!" I asked as much
of Allah. "There is but one God, and Mohammed
is his prophet! May this infidel have a
short life, and heavy punishment of Eblis!"

All this or fragments of it I could indeed
hear, for Turkish mendicants are always telling
their rosaries or muttering their prayers, and he
little thought I had some inkling of his sweet-
sounding, rude language. It was time—"quick
there with the landing-net!" He gathered
himself together to address me: that is to say, he
carefully drew out his stump, readjusted the
dead arm on the tray in a becoming pose, and
with the authoritative manner of a landlord
handling his own fixtures, he pulled his beard
sorrowfully (there the mendicant's game began),
and gave his face a pained expression as if
he had just borne an operation. It was only
after seriously performing the graceful salutation
which prevails all through the East, and
supersedes our blunter Saxon hand-shaking, that he
pronounced, with the air of a pasha, the one
word of salutation, "Salamet, sultanim!"
(Peace, O sultan!)

Grave and solemn impostors are these Orientals,
and to meet them in the dark winding
passages of their artfulness, one has to relearn
one's European Rogue's Catechism, and say it
backwards. Indeed, a Turkish rogue has,
astonishing to say, more the air of an English
popular preacher than anything else. Slowly
again, as I went and took up the limb, did that
solemn cheat press his hand upon his chest
(quasi heart), and then lightly with the tips of
his fingers, brothers of those crumply thin yellow
ones I now moved about, touch his forehead, or
quasi brain, and ejaculated, with the up-turned
eyes of gratitude not unknown upon our own
religious platforms,

"Khosh gueldiniz, safa gueldiniz!" (You have
come in safety, oh, may you depart in safety!)
"Hai guideh Inglis!" (O these brave English!)
"Amriniz chok olsun, effendim!" (May your
life be long, effendim!) And then, at the end
of every two or three words, a chanted, sonorous
groan, after the manner of the moolahs, of
"Thanks be to God!" No rogue perhaps ever
erected such costly machinery, or reared such
cumbrous scaffolds, to obtain merely an infidel's
halfpenny.

At that moment, as I was still examining
the atrophied arm, cut off just under the elbow,
feeling its mummy yellow skin, its dark nails
and bent skeletony fingers, uncertain how far
I should pretend to understand the rogue's
conversation for fear of spoiling my game; on the
one hand knowing that a rogue on his guard
is worth nothing to the observer, no, not even if
he be a Great Chimborazo Railway director; and,
on the other hand, very loth indeed to leave the
spot without hearing at least the Turk's own
version of his bereavement (more sincerely
lamented than many bereavements, I warrant),
a Deus stepped in, and politely undid the knot
of Gordium.

The Deus was a little handsome fleshy-lipped
Jew boy, Benjamin, who haunts the Pera hotels,
to guide travellers to the lions, and who was now
jaunty and gay (two piastres at least, in his
bank, I should say), his large, half-Armenian
eyes dancing with fun, came up with a smile of
triumph in his face at seeing an old customer
in a mess, and evidently requiring his