lishman's house is his castle, and every customer's appearance is the signal for a siege. The unconscionable length of time necessary to develop a bargain in Turkey accounts, perhaps, for the perpetual crowd in the bazaar. Whoever wishes to buy anything of which the price is not commonly known and fixed by custom, must return many times to the assault before he gets what he wants. The consequence is that where every customer comes four times instead of once to the shop where he has business, there are four times as many people in the tortuous passages and labyrinthine ways of the bazaar, as should legitimately correspond to the amount of business actually done. The process is certainly cumbrous. When you first see the object for which you are looking. you must be blind, not let your features betray by the least expression that you are interested. Next, you should ask the price of at least one hundred articles in the shop, being careful, however, not to omit the one you need, lest the omission should make the shopkeeper suspect that you want it. You will then send for coffee and say that you have not come to buy anything, but have merely made inquiries out of curiosity. A few days later come, and again ask the prices of several things. On your third visit you may allow yourself to look more closely at what you have long since mentally selected, and to offer the shopkeeper not more than one-third of what he asks. On the fourth day prepare for a final pitched battle. If you do not look unrighteously rich and have not the appearance of being a "tenderfoot," you may consider that you have done fairly well if you pay in the end about two-thirds of what was demanded, especially if you have dealt with a Turk or a Jew, avoiding anything like a Christian as you would shun the plague. But this roundabout process has compensations after all so real as to be almost attractions in themselves. Everything is mysterious in the bazaar and much is beautiful. A walled city within a walled city, and again an almost impregnable fortress within that, cut up in all directions by narrow passages, blind alleys and crossways, the whole being vaulted and roofed, and entirely lighted by

countless little domes-a labyrinth Cretan in its complications, and puzzling even to those who inhabit it, crowded by a busy, jostling, motley multitude drawn together from all quarters of the globe, and filled in all its recesses to very overflowing with every production of Western civilization and Eastern art, pervaded throughout its enormous extent to the strange smell of the East, so dear by strangers and so hateful to the exiled European-rich in everything, in life and sound and gorgeous color-the "charshi" of Stamboul stands alone in the whole world as the product of three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, fused at one busy, central, seething point.

The centre of centres, the safe deposit, the stronghold of the Constantinople merchant, is Bezestan the "Armorer's market." The wealth in this inner sanctum is said to be enormous— coin, precious stones, jewels of all sorts, silken carpets, rich embroideries, gold, weapons, and treasures of Oriental art of every sort, are deposited here in what must seem to an ordinary European a very casual way, in deal boxes more or less strengthened with iron and furnished with by no means burglar-proof locks. And yet nothing is ever stolen from Bezestan. It has heavy gates of its own; it is opened late and closed early, and the merchants and other depositors employ numerous watchmen by night and day, according to a system which is primeval in the East, and to which the West is rapidly approaching. After expending its ingenuity for centuries upon the construction of ingenious locks and bolts and bars, Europe is beginning to understand that approximate safety is only to be found in employing plenty of light and a reliable watchman.

It would be hopeless to attempt anything like a description of the merchandise and antiquities here accumulated for sale. Such a catalogue would fill a hundred volumes, in a place where hardly any two objects are alike. What strikes one is the enormous product of Eastern manual labor, its variety and its artistic beauty, and those facts are more familiar in the West than they were twenty years ago, when no

average cultivated person could tell by inspection whether a carpet were a Giordes or a Smyrna. But one is tempted to ask whether the world would not be richer and far more beautiful if the countless eyes that pore over "miserable books" and the innumerable fingers whose cherished occupation is to look as though they had none, were employed in producing something useful and yet not machine

made.

Constantinople owes much to the matchless beauty of the three waters

VOL. XIV.-72

which run together beneath its walls, and much of their reputation again has become world-wide by the kaik. It is disputed and disputable whether the Turks copied the Venetian gondola or whether the Venetians imitated the Turkish kaik, but the resemblance between them is so strong as to make it certain that they have a common origin. Take from the gondola the "felse," or hood, and the rostrated stem, and the remainder is practically the kaik. It is of all craft of its size the swiftest, the most easy to handle and the most comfortable, and the Turks are gener

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too are very great, and such as no ordinary oarsman would undertake for pleasure or for the sake of exercise. It is no joke to pull fifteen or sixteen miles against a stream which in some places runs four or five knots an hour.

The foreigner avoids the kaik when he is alone, because he cannot bargain, and because the only alternative is the society and unceasing chatter of the tormenting guide. But he loses much. It is well worth while to lie back among the cushions opposite the silent oarsmen with no companion but a cigarette, and to be pulled swiftly up the Golden Horn on a Friday afternoon in summer, choosing the hour so that the sun shall be behind the hill just as the kaik sweeps into the broad lagoon beyond the Arsenal. The river broadens and narrows suddenly again and again, streaked with light and shade, and the reflections of the soft green hills, shot

Now, as the water widens, there is room for all and they spread like a fan, hastening to be the first at the narrows beyond; and then you are in the throng again, wondering at the boatmen's matchless skill and sometimes at their marvellous good temper. Then under pretty wooden bridges, between low river banks carpeted with turf. Trees grow in little thickset plantations, and in each tiny grove the coffeeseller has his small furnace of live coals, his water-jar and his array of spotless

There, in the deep, cool shade, whole families spend the afternoon at rest, the women and children seated together upon the grass, their ferajehs drawn closely round them and their yashmaks carelessly draped around their faces, while the men are grouped by themselves a little apart. As you near the Imperial villa trees grow more closely together and the people are more numerous; Egyptian fiddlers and