of which here and there peep our sprays of
diamond and bosses of emerald.

Barouches, broad and sweeping in their graceful
curves, and holding bouquets of beauties as
flower-pots hold nosegays, there are none here;
snug broughams (in our sense), quiet and trim,
there are none here; high-poised, swift gigs, there
are none here; fleshy-legged footmen, hanging
on in bunches behind blazoned carriages, there
are none here. Instead of our John Thomas
with the corpulent calves, I see only black
eunuchs with crescent sabres, scowling faces,
and immense lips. There are rude,
coarsely-painted red and yellow telekis, not like the
others, but I suppose hack ones, with daubed
landscapes on the roofs, and no windows, on
blinds, and no doors: so that you have to take a
harlequin leap in, knocking your head against
the wooden top. The teleki has no springs,
and a dreadful life you lead inside it upon a
stony Turkish road.

Peacock-fans, with your emerald eyes, get ye
behind me till I have described the third and
most barbarous and fantastic of Turkish conveyances
—that is the araba, in which ladies, all
rose-colour, satin, and apple-green, and mulberry,
and silver sprigs, take the air, though I should
imagine that Tamerlane's grandmother and
Amurath's great-aunt were tormented in just
such cumbrous Tartar vehicles. I think I have
heard that the Sultan's mother herself, or some
lady of equal rank, used to ride in such a caravan.
It is, in shape, something between a
pleasure-van and a dung-cart, with a queer scaffolding
of poles about it. It is drawn at the funeral rate of
never more than three miles and a half an hour
by white oxen, whose foreheads are dabbed red
with some sort of rouge or pinkish dye. The
wooden collars of this stolid, meek-eyed pair,
antagonistic to railways, rise three or four feet
high, and are covered with red and black tassels
of great weight and length. Sometimes, a black
flood of tassels and steel ornaments, sways down
from the yoke, and sometimes red cords run
from it to the oxen's tails, which they loop up.
At the four corners of the ox-waggon, are four
poles supporting a clumsy canopy of red cloth
or velvet, and within, on gold-fringed cushions,
(the bruising araba need be wadded), lie, in a
heap of colours, negress duennas, children in red
fezes, and veiled ladies lovely as Aurora when
she wears a gauzy veil of mist: white feather
fans, and a sense of jewels everywhere, only
partially concealed. French parasols, looking as if
they were made of flower leaves sewn together,
also crop out, for France always leads the van
of fashionable civilisation in flimsy essentials
and charming unessentials. A very unreal,
fantastic, degrading, debasing life is that of the
Turkish slave wife, with no amusement but the
bath, the ribald jokes of dwarfs and jesters, and
this senseless one day's exercise in the week.

Windybank, like Admiral Slade, praises everything
about Stamboul, being in good humour at
some successful negotiation about his railway
through the Andes and over Chimborazo; says
the Turkish women are beautiful and happy; that
it is all nonsense about the Sultan's seven hundred
slaves, he having only seven real wives; that he is,
in fact, a mild, melancholy angel of a man, but that,
sad to say, his troubles and distractions, and the
ambassadors, and all together, " are making him
drink champagne and brandy too freely, even for a
Frank." Simple-hearted Windybank!

But we have now got far from the Bosphorus,
and the little stone quay where the caïques lie,
their gilt mouths nibbling at the wall, like a shoal
of monster fish; far from the Sultan's
over-decorated Italian kiosk, gay monument of national
bankruptcy and ruin; far from the square,
broad-roofed fountain, with the long slabs of blue and
gilt inscriptions in Turkish, telling you that
"the water that poured below into the tanks is
sweet as the Zemzem well that Abraham drank
of, and delicious to the hot and thirsty as the
rivers of Paradise;" far from the plane-trees
with the jagged leaf and the white dappled bark.
I and Windybank stroll up the valley. The place
is more curious than beautiful. I would rather
have a green, nestling, hill-girt Devonshire valley
any day, but for the strange sights and associations
here, and the Bluebeards and Camaralzamans,
who sit cross-legged on the dry turf, or
patrol in jolting telekis, or in the clumsy state
of the unwieldy arabas. We get tired of the
laborious idleness of the gala day, of seeing people
one must not talk to under pain of a blow from
a eunuch's sabre, and of the dreary mill-horse
grind of carriages, and we push on down an
intolerable lane deeply banked, making for the
inner valley, where the Sweet Waters that
feed the fountain on the shore wind and
whisper.

The lane that connects this Hyde Park with
this Green Park—to use a simile that realises the
position of the two places at once to most
Englishmen—is not a model lane. It is a medley of
dust and mud, and is walled in by brambles and
the snaky roots of old fig-trees. Its ruts are as
deep as those of a country by-lane in England
after harvest or a wet summer. They half
bury the wheels of those painted egg-shells of
telekis: and as for the ox-waggons, they are so
wide that they fill it up altogether, and drive
the pedestrians to the prickly hedge, and the
fig-trees and the elevated bank. Windybank and
I escape with difficulty being Juggeruauted to
death by the ponderous wheels of the
ox-waggons and the toe-crushing circumference of the
more volatile telekis, and by elongating and
compressing ourselves against the brambly bank, get
at last into the inner valley, to find nothing but
more tulip crowds of shining satin ferigees,
flaunting negresses, Nubian musicians, painted
veiled ladies, with more moored-up carriages, with
Turks smoking composedly out of the windows,
more rows of hack horses and noisy
groom-boys.

When I dare to confess that I think even
Rotten-row and its slow daily procession, insanely
tedious, need I say that I thought the Sweet Waters
by no means lively? To fish up boiled Indian corn
from a caldron, to listen to Nubians' screeching
songs, to see cross-legged men smoking, and