contrives, as we enter, to swerve round to us,
and, half raving, half crying, to roar at us, and
tell us he is a Greek admiral kept there by the
Turks—for "nothing—nothing—nothing!"

On pallets round, or on the stone floor by the
grated windows, were other madmen, gibbering
together.

As the poor bound, possessed man still kept
writhing with his fetters, and tossing his poor
distracted head backward and forward, now
screaming and cursing, now whining and drivelling
and crying, we thought it better to pass on
to the women's ward. There, with the exception
of the total want of bonnet making, or straw
plaiting, or any of those humane and wise
employments which women in Bedlam are occupied
in, the scene much resembled that of any English
lunatic asylum. There were certainly no long,
airy corridors, clean as Dutch palaces; no
pleasant, lofty windows; no sense of watchful,
prudent care of almost religious regularity and
order. But, still, there was every decency
preserved, and, for a Turkish or Greek establishment,
it was neat and trim. Three of the female
attendants were resting, in their own side
rooms, on Turkish cushioned divans; the
patients seemed tranquil and reasonably
content. There was, as there always is in asylums,
the woman who comes up smiling, then slyly tries
to run a pin into your arm; there was the
dramatic, talkative woman, with wrongs; there
was the religious maniac, ever at prayer; there
was the noisy, vain maniac, who all day ties
bows and arranges her dress. The dramatic
woman, standing up before me with long
dishevelled hair and arms crossed, looked quite the
Pythoness as she poured forth, in mellifluous
Turkish, an endless stream of statement, which,
for the mere babble of its music, I could have
listened to for an hour.

As we passed out from the wards into
the palisaded paddock, where the insane
promenade, a little old woman followed us,
whining as piteously as if she were being loaded
with stripes. Nothing could appease her. I
tried her with all the Turkish words of rank and
title I could think of, to soothe her. I offered
her money as she squatted down crying under a
wall, and she threw it away, whining and
fretting like a child put in a corner, at which all
the turnkeys (who had a fine vein of humour
that would turn a friend's suicide into a
joke, and a mother's funeral into a source of
sociable amusement) laughed till their red fez
caps nearly dropped off, as if so "funny" a
thing had not happened in their time. But
when, as one of them cautiously unlocked
the paled gate, and opened it scantily to let me
pass, the old woman suddenly burst through,
and scudded, crying and howling, among the
huge golden sunflowers in the garden, like an
old Eve regaining Paradise, they fairly laughed
till their jacket buttons sprang open.

Last scene of all, was the madmen's evening
service in the little Greek chapel attached to the
asylum. There, the brutal-looking priest bowed,
and sang through his nose. There, in stalls, as
in the choir of cathedrals, the maniacs sang also
through their noses, and behaved quite as
rationally as either priest or people at St. George's-
in-the-East. There, among tinselled
candlesticks, burning in bright noon—to help God's
sun, I suppose—and among millinery flowers and
dirty pink ribbons, each of them by turns went
up to the screen, and kissed the tinselled
barbarous pictures of the saints. My last
remembrance of that asylum is a spicy wave of the
chafing dish of incense as I leaped on my horse,
and shook its bridle, which was strung with
Turkish talismans, and of a parting howl from
the windows, as I cantered off down the
approach, between the great sunflowers with downcast
faces.

I do not know how other people felt, on the
quiet Sunday morning soon afterwards, in the
English chapel at Pera; but I confess I felt
like one of the early Christians worshipping by
stealth in some hole or corner of Diocletian's
Rome, during the heat of that monster's persecution.
There was something sneaking in the
tolerated way we crept to church, distrustful of
turbans, and timidly avoiding the gay Greeks
rollicking at the little round marble tables of
their cafés on the terrace above the burial-
ground. Toleration! And this is what the
Crusaders' descendants have come to!

I paid peculiar attention that morning to the
purified Church service, grand in its simplicity,
because I and Rocket were going, after the
sermon, to see the dancing dervishes at their
convent chapel close by. The plain white robe
barred with crimson scarf, the grave black
gown, had to me that morning a new aspect.
The prayers that children can understand, and
the wisest of men cannot surpass, I was soon
to compare with shouted sentences of Mahomet's
poor rambling poem stuffed with garbled Scripture
stories. I was going to see the sleeping tiger of
Mohammedanism, rampant, bloodthirsty, and in
the old attitude of dangerous rapacity and fierceness.
I was going to see one of the most curious
and wild sect of Mohammedan dissenters perform
their magic rites. I had read of the shrieks
and meanings of American camp meetings, of
the groans and fits of Wesley's open air praying
mobs, of the Flagellants of the Middle Ages, of
the knavish Convulsionnaires of France, of the
ravings of the Pythoness at Delphi, of the
ecstatic visions of Swedenborg in Pentonville,
but here I expected to see something
peculiarly strange and un-European, something
specially indicative that I was among men of a
new race and a new faith. That the dervishes'
rites were not ludicrous waltzing extravagances,
as the pedant traveller generally describes them,
I felt quite sure.

The Christian sermon over, I and Rocket
moved straight for the dervishes' convent: about
one o'clock being the usual time that their
service commenced. After some zig-zagging, and
much crawling up burning steep streets, and
much hurrying down sloping alleys, being led and
directed by Greeks north, south, east, and west,