Two generations preceding 1789

In the two generations preceding 1789, such Englishmen as Boling- broke, Hume, Adam Smith, Priestley, Bentham, John Howard (one might almost claim part, at least, of Burke and of Pitt); such Americans as Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson; such Italians as Beccaria and Galiani; such Germans as Lessing, Goethe, Frederick the Great, and Joseph 11., had as much part in it as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Turgot, Diderot, and Condorcet, and the rest of the French thinkers who are specially associated in our thoughts with the movement so ill-described as the French Revolution.

By the efforts of such men every element of modern society, and every political institution as we now know it, had been reviewed and debated — not, indeed, with any coherent doctrine, and utterly without system or method. The reformers differed much amongst themselves, and there were almost as many schemes of political philosophy, of social economy, or practical organisation, as there were writers and speakers. But in the result, what we now call modern Europe emerged, recast in State, in Church, in financial, commercial, and industrial organisation, with a new legal system, a new fiscal system, a humane code, and religious equality.

Over the whole of Europe the civil and criminal code was entirely recast; cruel punishments, barbarous sentences, anomalies, and confusion were swept away; the treatment of criminals, of the sick, of the insane, and of the destitute was subjected to a continuous and systematic reform, of which we have as yet seen only the first instalment. The whole range of fiscal taxation, local and imperial, external and internal, direct and indirect, has been in almost every part of Western Europe entirely reformed. A new local administration on the principle of departments, subdivided into districts, cantons, and communes, has been established in France, and thence copied in a large part of Europe customized tours istanbul.

The old feudal system of territorial law

The old feudal system of territorial law, which in England had been to a great extent reformed at the Civil War, was recast not only in France but in the greater part of Western Europe. Protestants, Jews, and Dissenters of all orders practically obtained full toleration and the right of worship. The monstrous corruption and wealth of the remnants of the mediaeval Church was reduced to manageable proportions. Public education became one of the great functions of the State. Public health, public morality, science, art, industry, roads, posts, and trade became the substantive business of government. These are ‘the ideas of ’89’ — these are the ideas which for two generations before ’89 Europe had been preparing, and which for three generations since ’89 she has been systematically working out.

We have just taken a rapid survey of Franee in its political and material organisation down to 1789, let us take an equally rapid survey of the new institutions which 1789 so loudly proclaimed, and so stormily introduced.

For the old patriarchal, proprietary, de jure theory of rule, there was everywhere substituted on the continent of Europe the popular, fiduciary, pro bono publico notion of rule. Government ceased to be the privilege of the ruler; it became a trust imposed on the ruler for the common weal of the ruled. Long before 1789 this general idea had been established in England and in the United States.

West Saxon’s indignation

‘ But no decent historian ever does intend to state what he knows to be an error,’ said Phil, somewhat surprised at the warmth of the West Saxon’s indignation.

‘ I should think not indeed,’ said Wessex; ‘ no one but a thief intends to take what is not his own, and no one but a liar means to state what he knows to be untrue. But the historian of all men is bound by the sanctities of his office to what we call in Roman law summa diligentia. And to be thinking of his “pictures,” of the scheme of his colours and other literary effects, forms a most dangerous temptation to adopt the picturesque form of a story in place of the recorded truth. Unfortunately, as we know to our sorrow, the materials of the historian are of almost every sort — good, doubtful, and worthless; the so-called histories go on copying one another, adding something to heighten the lights out of quite second-rate authority; a wrong reference, a false date, a hearsay anecdote gets into accepted histories, and it costs years of labour to get the truth at last. If you ever hope to be a historian, you must treat historical falsehood as you would a mad dog, and never admit a phrase or a name which suggests an untruth private sofia tours.’

‘ Has not this purism been a little overdone? ’ said the innocent freshman. ‘I remember that Freeman once told us he could not bear to speak of the Battle of Hastings, lest some one should imagine that it began on the seashore.’

Replied the Bede

‘A fine example of scrupulous love of truth,’ replied the Bede, ‘and I wish that all histories of England had been written in a similar spirit. Can anything be more unscholarly than a readiness to accept a statement which we have not probed to the core, simply because it works up into a telling picture, or will point an effective paragraph? It is positively dishonest! And some of them will quote you a passage which you discover, on collating it with the original, has a blunder in every sentence, and a mistranslation in every page. If you write a romance, you may go to your imagination for your facts. If you write history, you should scrupulously extract the best contemporary record, and throw everything else into the fire. I sometimes wish that histories were not published at all in the current English of literature, but were plain and disconnected propositions of fact, like the cuneiform inscriptions of Daryavush at Behistun.’

‘Surely,’ cried Phil, with a laugh, ‘that would be a little dull! It would be a mere lexicon. No one could get up Facciolati or Littrd as we get up Herodotus. Besides, the enormous number of propositions, each of which might fairly be called “ truth,” would make history impossible even for the most prodigious memory.’

‘You forget,’ said the tutor, ‘that we treat history in “periods” of short or, at any rate, of manageable length. Nobody has any business out of his own “period,” and if he trespasses on to another man’s “period,” he is pretty certain to be caught. The “ periods ” in our schools are far, far too long, and encourage superficial and flashy habits of reading. I remember dear old Bodley, late Professor of Palaeography, who was before your time, saying that ten years in the fourteenth century was about as much as any man should try to master. He died, poor old boy, before his great book was ever got into shape at all; and perhaps ten years is rather short for a distinct period. But it takes a good man to know as much as a century, as it ought to be known. And one of our greatest living masters in history, with enormous industry and perseverance, just manages to write the events of one year in the seventeenth century within each twelve-months of his own laborious life.’

Politically vigorous

With these threefold sources of corruption—war, slavery, false belief — the Roman empire, so magnificent without, was a rotten fabric within. Politically vigorous, morally it was diseased. Never perhaps has the world witnessed cases of such stupendous moral corruption, as when immense power, boundless riches, and native energy were left as they were then without object, control, or shame. Then, from time to time, there broke forth a very orgy of wanton strength. But its hour was come. The best spirits were all filled with a sense of the hollowness and corruption around them. Statesmen, poets, and philosophers in all these last eras were pouring forth their complaints and fears, or feebly attempting remedies. The new element had long been making its way unseen, had long been preparing the ground, and throughout the civilised world there was rising up a groan of weariness and despair.

For three centuries a belief in the existence of one God alone, in whom were concentrated all power and goodness, who cared for the moral guidance of mankind, a belief in the immortality of the soul and its existence in another state, had been growing up in the minds of the best Greek thinkers. The noble morality of their philosophers had taken strong hold of the higher consciences of Rome, and had diffused amongst the better spirits throughout the empire new and purer types. Next the great empire itself, forcing all nations in one state, had long inspired in its worthiest members a sense of the great brotherhood of mankind, had slowly mitigated the worst evils of slavery, and paved the way for a religious society. Thirdly, another and a greater cause was at work guided tours turkey.

Overruling Creator

Through Greek teachers the world had long been growing familiar with the religious ideas of Asia, its conceptions of a superhuman world, of a world of spirit, angel, demon, future state, and overruling Creator, with its mystical imagery, its spiritual poetry, its intense zeal and fervent emotion. And now, partly from the contact with Greek thought and Roman civilisation, a great change was taking place in the very heart of that small Jewish race, of all the races of Asia known to us the most intense, imaginative, and pure: possessing a high sense of personal morality, the keenest yearnings of the heart, and the deepest capacity for spiritual fervour.

In their midst arose a fellowship of devoted brethren, gathered around one noble and touching character, which adoration has veiled in mystery till he passes from the pale of definite history. On them had dawned the vision of a new era of their national faith, which should expand the devotion of David, the spiritual zeal of Isaiah, and the moral power of Samuel into a gentler, wider, and more loving spirit.

How this new idea grew to the height of a new religion, and was shed over the whole earth by the strength of its intensity and its purity, is to us a familiar tale. We know how the first fellowship of the brethren met; how they went forth with words of mercy, love, justice, and hope; we know their self-denial, humility, and zeal; their heroic lives and awful deaths; their loving natures and their noble purposes; how they gathered around them wherever they came the purest and greatest; how across mountains, seas, and continents the communion of saints joined in affectionate trust; how from the deepest corruption of the heart arose a yearning for a truer life; how the new faith, ennobling the instincts of human nature, raised up the slave, the poor, and the humble to the dignity of common manhood, and gave new meaning to the true nature of womanhood; how, by slow degrees, the church, with its rule of right, of morality, and of communion, arose; how the first founders and apostles of this faith lived and died, and all their gifts were concentrated in one, of all the characters of certain history doubtless the loftiest and purest — the unselfish, the great-hearted Paul.

Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus

“Well, you have had quite a day’s work,” says the missionary, as they turn at length toward the hotel once more. “ It has been rather a busy day,” says the visitor, ruefully, for he feels that he has had a surfeit of missions, and has walked almost twenty miles besides. He is glad enough that the time is short when the missionary goes on to apologize because time does not allow him to be taken to other congregations in the city connected with the Mission. One of them is in Hasskeuy on the Golden Horn, another is in Scutari, on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus, and not far from that great hospital where Florence Nightingale did her work as a nurse during the Crimean war. Besides these there are also an English service for the students of the Girls’ College in Scutari, another English service for the students of Robert College on the Bosphorus, a congregation of some forty Armenians at the house of Dr. Washburn for whom Mrs. Washburn always sees that a preacher is provided, and another little congregation of as many more Armenians and Greeks together at one of the districts farther up the Bosphorus.

American Board’s mission in Constantinople

visitor is quite willing to admit that the work of the American Board’s mission in Constantinople is not solely educational work. He does not need to be dragged about to see all these other congregations. And in the evening as he thinks it over at his hotel, tired as he is with gadding, he is glad that there are men and women who are not too tired with the labours of the week to use their day of rest in trying to aid the spiritual development of this medley of peoples. For at this meeting point of the continents this kind of work, if properly maintained must end in teaching men and women over large expanses of territory to know Jesus Christ, must attract them to follow Him, and must inspire them to do the same kind of work for their fellows in all the places where they live or to which they go for business or pleasure. The work of the mission is the slow work of influencing the roots of character. But let the friends of Jesus Christ in the western lands support this work as it should be supported, and we shall begin to see that the awakening of the Eastern Church from its long lethargy has begun private ephesus tours.

The missionary does not merely preach to the people. He seeks to win a place in their hearts by all means in his power.

Among the motley crowds in the streets of Constantinople are seen great numbers of coarsely dressed villagers, in blue cotton clothing with a bright handkerchief perhaps around the head and a gaily coloured shawl wound about the waist to keep together the loose and unfitted clothing. Some of these are Kourds, who arc the burden bearers, and the ditch-diggers of the city, and some are Armenians, who are the masons and carpenters, and the hod-carriers of every enterprise in building houses.

All such have come from their homes at the ends of the Empire, often plodding on foot for two or three weeks to reach a sea-port, and then crowding the decks of the steamers with their bedding and their food bags because they are unable to pay the cost of even a steerage ticket. In the city they live in masses together, six or eight men hiring a room and making it their home during four or five years while they are earning enough money to make it worth while for them to return again to visit their families.

European colony without really knowing

With rare exceptions the result of this state of affairs is that the Turk, if in official position, rubs shoulders with the best part of the European colony without really knowing one of them, or if he is in common life he merely looks at them afar off. In either case the European with whom the Turk comes into real contact is the profligate one—the one who to whom the Turk might perhaps teach morals, or else it is the half-blood Levantine who poses as a European on the strength of his right to wear a hat. The idea of the Western civilization received by the Turk from either of these is that it centres about wine, women, and the roulette table. If he had before no tendency to haunt the drinking houses and brothels of Pera, the Turk gets the impulse to do so from the “ Europeans ” whom he has met, and that very rapidly makes an end of him.

Civilization represented by Western commercial enterprise and isolated from religious principle has been in contact with the people of Constantinople for many many years. Since the Crimean War it has had untrammelled sway. Some of the externals of environment have benefited from this contact. Individuals may sometimes have been lifted out of the quagmires of the mass of the population by glimpses of what manhood really is. But there is no question as to the general result. The result has been the moral deterioration of the city, and the strengthening of the repulsion felt by Turks toward the West.

Constantinople dealt

One of the leading Turkish papers of Constantinople dealt with this subject not long ago. It said that the one positive influence of Western civilization is against faith in God and in favour of drunkenness and debauchery. It pointed to the great number of disorderly houses in Pera, which engulf and destroy large numbers of Mohammedan youth, and it declared in open terms that the family life of Europeans living in Pera is such as to lead to the supposition that marital fidelity is not known there. “ We want none of this Christian civilization,” said the Turk jeep safari bulgaria.

The syndicate of European officials who constitute the Administrators of the Turkish Public Debt, have multiplied several fold the places in Constantinople where liquor is sold. They are proud of this, for it has added to the revenues derived from the tax on liquors and has brought dividends to the holders of Turkish bonds. But it is worthy of note that during two hundred years of commercial intercourse between the Turkish people and civilized Europe, the mercantile colonists living in Constantinople in all the splendour of superior culture, enterprise and business success, have not once tried to do anything for the improvement of the minds or the morals of the native population, whether Mohammedan or Christian. It was the missionary spirit in Roman Catholic and Protestant churches which first gave the city schools that could teach and school books which children could understand.

Even Armenian and Greek women

A few years ago one of these dervishes discovered a new method of wider influence in making his wife a member of the dervish order and advancing her to as high a rank as himself. From that moment his fortune was made. The man in a room full of men, and the wife in a room full of women, exercised the gift of healing by reciting intricate formulas over the heads of patients, and by blowing in their faces. A single breath from one of these workers of magic was held to be worth a whole drug store full of mere medicine, and the pair received two or three hundred dollars at a sitting. Even Armenian and Greek women came in numbers to partake of the benefits of this combination, and swell its revenues.

It is the women of the country who hold to such remedies for the nervous fears of childhood as this: The cause of the fear is that a demon has secretly shown himself to the child. The remedy is to take a bullet which has been fifed from a gun, to melt it, and to pour the melted lead into a basin of water in which the child has been washed after being prepared by reciting over it appropriate verses of Scripture. The lead must be poured out in three portions, and then the remnant poured into the water will assume the form and appearance of the offending demon. If the lead last poured into the water is carefully preserved and hung about the neck of the child, the demon will recognize his likeness and fearing to be interfered with now that he is found out, lie will show himself no more in the neighbourhood of the child. It is the women, too, who insist at the time of a conflagration, that after the fire is extinguished a sheep must be killed and its blood mixed with the water of the fire-engine so that it may be thrown for good luck ” over the house at which the fire was stayed. The men may or may not believe in these follies, but they are as wax in the hands of the wives, who always find means to bring them to assist in the most heathenish incantations private tours istanbul.

Another element of this Woman Question is this. The women, notwithstanding all this ignorance and unfitness to guide others, hold ultimate sway over the conduct of the men. The tangled intrigues for place and power which centre in the harem form the key to many vicissitudes of Turkish history.

 Poland as a result of a war of the Harem

In the reign of Sultan Mohammed IV., Turkey became involved in war with Poland as a result of a war of the Harem. One of the Sultan’s wives was jealous of the influence of the Sultan’s mother. To secure the downfall of that lady, the wife thought it a small thing to invite the King of Poland to invade Turkey which seemed unprepared for war, to stain vast regions with blood, and to hope that the army upon the first defeat would depose the Sultan, her own husband. In order to carry out this precious scheme the woman had first made the Grand Vezir her devoted slave. But the Sultan unexpectedly defeated the Polish army in battle, captured the treasonable correspondence of his wife and unearthed the whole plot. So the Sultan’s mother had the grim pleasure of seeing the head of her rival carried out of the palace in the same basket with those of the Grand Vezir and the other conspirators.

Sultan Ahmed 1. picked up a Greek girl some-where, named Kiusen. She was not beautiful, but she ruled the Sultan by her bright and pleasing wit. Kiusen, after securing the aid of a man whom she caused to be appointed Grand Vezir in reward for his services, devoted her life to the advancement of her sons to the throne of Turkey in place of older princes, the children of less keen-witted wives.

She succeeded in making and unmaking Sultans as well as Prime Ministers, and at last, when in the seventieth year of her age she was strangled in order to end her jealous intrigues, she had ruled the Empire through the reign of four successive Sultans— her husband, her two sons, and her grandson— while her quarrels with the mother of the last of these four had brought the Turkish Empire to the verge of disruption and had destroyed several of its ablest statesmen. One cannot but feel sympathy with the feeling that gives to such women their power on reading the reply of Sultan Abd ul Mejid, the father of the present Sultan Abd ul Hamid, to Lord Stratfoid de Redcliffe when that great Ambassador hinted that a little less subservience on the part of the Sovereign to the wishes of the Sultan’s mother would be advantageous to Turkey. Said the Sultan: “ I have a thousand servants and wives and dependents and grovelling courtiers in my palace, but I have only one true friend; and that is my mother.”

Jesus Christ over the heathen world

When Constantine, 1500 years ago, was marking out lines of fortification for his new capital, some of his couriers, surprised at the greatness of the included space, asked “ How far are you going to carry the lines?” “ Until lie stops who goes before me,” was the answer of the Emperor. He deemed the city to belong to Jesus Christ; a token of the triumph of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ over the heathen world. To emphasize this idea, Justinian in reconstructing the Cathedral of St. Sophia, tore from the temples of Jupiter, and Venus, and Diana, and Baal, and Astarte, and Isis, and Osiris through all the region of the Eastern Mediterranean, their finest marbles and most noble columns. And the gracious majesty of that venerable monument to the overthrow of paganism still draws visitors from all parts of the world.

The name of Mohammed gleaming

The church is now a Mohammedan mosque. The name of Mohammed gleaming in letters of gold by the side of the name of God above the place where the Christian altar used to be, testifies to the failure and downfall of Oriental Christianity in that place, and makes this ancient Cathedral a monument to warn men of the doom awaiting political Christianity everywhere. Knowing by experience, ourselves, the blinding splendour of the temptation when the devil insidiously offers to satisfy all cravings of selfishness in return for some small concession—the Kingdoms of the earth in return for admission that the glory of such possession will content our cravings —we may not judge too harshly the fall of the early Church into this snare. But thus it was that this Church, after celebrating here in the fourth century the triumph of Christianity over the pagan world, became itself in the tenth century an object lesson in the capacity of the old pagan covetousness and lust for power to deaden disinterested devotion to Jesus Christ, so that in the fifteenth century the Lord “ removed its candlestick out of its place sightseeing sofia.”

Eastern Roman Empire

By the time that Islam finally crushed the Eastern Roman Empire, the name of Constantinople had long been synonymous in Western Asia with Imperial power. The Arabs to this day give it the dreadful name of Imperial Rome (Rourn) and know its sovereign as the Sultan of Rome. To the people of the whole region between Bokhara and Afghanistan and the Mediterranean this city is the wonderful place where might and wealth and knowledge take their source. As for the Turkish Empire the whole mass of doleful, disheartened territory is a mere appendage to Constantinople. Throughout its whole extent not a church nor a school, nor a factory nor a sawmill nor a village road nor a bridge over a rivulet can be built, not a book or newspaper can be printed nor a printing press set up, not a single petty official can take office without examination of the question at Constantinople. To this city young men in all Turkey look for their career, merchants for their goods, farmers for their market, mechanics for a field for their skill, and day-laborer’s for unlimited employment.

The whole male population of the Empire has for its ideal of success in life the opportunity to spend some years in Constantinople, and a large part of each successive generation attains to this ideal and is thus more or less formed by the influences of the great city. The eyes of all religious denominations too, instinctively turn to Constantinople for instruction in doctrine and polity and for the crown of successful effort. There lives the great head of Mohammedanism in all the world. There the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church still sits in the chair of Chrysostom, unmoved by the vain and restless curiosity respecting the nature of truth which first drove the Western Church into schism, and then tore the wandering schismatics of Rome into separate and discordant sects of many names.

Four or five miles from Constantinople

We had a wild scamper over the hills again ; but, when four or five miles from Constantinople, it got so dark that we were obliged to pull up and walk our horses, on account of the bad road and the holes. At last we saw the lights of Pera, and once more threaded our way amongst the dogs and people, along its narrow Street, to the hotel.

It was very hot indeed that night. The wind went round, and changed to the stifling sirocco. As such, I knew my fate, and prepared to lie down the whole of the next day with a feverish head-ache, gasping instead of breathing — such being the invariable effects of the blighting wind upon me. These, however, lasted no longer than the cause, and when the refreshing breeze came down again from the Euxine, I was at once as well as ever. As this was the only indisposition I suffered from, during the whole of my absence from England, with every change of temperature, climate, diet, and general habits, that could try a constitution, T always considered myself very fortunate, and was grateful accordingly city tours istanbul. It must be very sad to be laid up for any time with illness in a strange country; and although a clever Turkish member of our own College of Surgeons, Mr. Zohrab, is practising in Pera, I preferred dispensing altogether with his assistance.

PRINCE’S ISLAND, AND ITS POPULAR AMUSEMENTS

Home superstition becomes sadly upset when we find that Friday is considered the most fortunate day of the week, in the East, and the Turks like to begin or perform any work on that day, accordingly- It is also their Sabbath; and, during the fine weather, the women go in crowds to the Sweet Waters of Asia — a beautiful valley near the fortress of Hissari, on the Bosphorus, watered by the River Goksu. They spread their carpets here, and pass the day in admiring themselves in mirrors, smoking, chatting, and eating sweetmeats. I was told that many flirtations were originated on these occasions, but with Moslem gallants. There is not a chance for a Frank traveller to establish one ; and, therefore, when such a one boasts of any success in this particular line, whatever else he says may be believed as fully — at least, in nine cases out of ten. All I know from my own experience is, that every attempt I made at philandering with the belles of Stamboul, and once or twice under unusual advantages, turned out a total, not to say contemptible, failure.

Cashmere shawls

Smyrna had, in some measure, prepared me for the general appearance of an oriental bazaar; but the vast extent of these markets at Constantinople created a still more vivid impression. To say that the covered rows of shops must, altogether, be miles in length — that vista after vista opens upon the gaze of the astonished stranger, lined with the costliest productions of the world, each collected in its proper district — that one may walk for an hour, without going over the same ground twice, amidst diamonds, gold, and ivory; Cashmere shawls, and Chinese silks; glittering arms, costly perfumes, embroidered slippers, and mirrors; rare brocades, ermines, Morocco leathers, Persian nick-nacks; amber mouth-pieces, and jewelled pipes —that, looking along the shortest avenue, every known tint and color meets the eye at once, in the wares and costumes, and that the noise, the motion, the novelty of this strange spectacle are at first perfectly bewildering — all the possibly gives the reader the notion of some kind of splendid mart fitted to supply the wants of the glittering personages who figure in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments; yet it can convey but a poor idea of the real interest which such a place calls forth, or the most extraordinary assemblage of treasures displayed there, amidst so much apparent shabbiness.

Elegant street

No spot in the world — neither the Parisian Boulevards, nor our own Elegant-street — can boast of such an accumulation of valuable wares from afar, as the great bazaar at Constantinople. Hundreds and thousands of miles of rocky road and sandy desert have been traversed by the moaning camels who have carried those silks and precious stones from Persia, with the caravan. From the wild regions of the mysterious central Africa, that ivory, so cunningly worked, in the next row, has been brought — the coal-black people only know how — until the Nile floated it down to Lower Egypt. Then those soft Cashmere shawls have made a long and treacherous journey to Trebizond, whence the fleet barks of the cold and stormy Euxine at last brought them up the fairy Bosphorus to the very water’s edge of the city. From the remote active America; from sturdy England ; from Cadiz, Marseilles, and all along the glowing shores of the Mediterranean, safely carried over the dark and leaping sea, by brave iron monsters that have fought the winds with their scalding breath, — these wares have come, to tempt the purchasers in the pleasant, calm, subdued light of the bazaars of Stamboul.

I have said that each article has its proper bazaar assigned to it. Tims, there L one row for muslins, another for slippers, another for fezzes, for shawls, for arms, for drugs, and so on. let there is no competition amongst the shopkeepers. No struggling to out-placard or out-ad verity each other, as would oeuvre with us in cool-headed, feverish, crafty, credulous London. You must not expect them to pull one thing down after another for yon to look at, until it appears hopeless to conceive that the counter will ever again be tidy, or everything returned to its place. The merchant will show you what you ask for, but no more. He imagines that when you came to buy at his store, you had made up your mind as to what you wanted; and that, not finding it, you will go elsewhere, and leave him to his pipe again.

He knows how to charge, though, but he is easily open to conviction that he has asked too high a price. For the way of dealing with him is as follows. Wanting one of the light scarfs with the fringed ends, which supersede the use of braces in the Levant, I inquired the price at a bazaar stall. The man told me fifty piastres, (half a sovereign.) I immediately offered him five-and- twenty. This he did not take, and I was walking away, when he called me back, and said I should have it. I told him, as he had tried to cheat me, I would not give him more than twenty, now; upon which, without any hesitation, he said it was mine. This plan I afterwards pursued, whenever I made a purchase at Constantinople, and I most generally found it answer. My merry friend at Smyrna had given me the first lesson in its practicability private tour ephesus.

I do not suppose that they ask these high prices, as the French do, because they suppose we are made of money; I believe, on the contrary, that they try to impose on their own countrymen in the same manner; for, to judge from the long haggling and solemn argument which takes place when they buy of each other, the same wide difference of opinion as to a fair value exists between the purchaser and vendor, under every circumstance.

Considered contagious except money

When a ship arrives in a quarantine port, from a suspected district, she is placed under the strictest surveillance. Attendants from the health-office are put on board: everything sent on shore has to undergo purification—if goods, by quarantine; if letters, by fumigation—in fact, everything is considered contagious except money, which is simply received in a vessel of water at the end of a pole by the people in the boats. On the other hand, everything from the shore, touched by anything or any body on the ship, is at once contaminated, and subject to the same quarantine. At Malta, this circumstance leads to many rows with the homeward bound passengers. Yaletta is famous for the manufacture of fine mittens and black lace; and when the overland steamers arrive, the quarantine harbour is filled with the boats of the dealers.

The articles are handed up in boxes at the ends of poles for inspection. The unthinking passengers turn them over to look at, and are immediately compelled to take the whole, because their touch has infected them. At Beyrout, speculators occasionally put off with Syrian curiosities—chaplets of olive-stones, from the Mount of Olives; cedar cones from Lebanon, and the like. On the occasion to which I now allude, a sharp touter had got ahead of his companions, and was beginning to treat with some passengers; selling the aforesaid wonders, and recommending dragomen. The engineer had, as is common, a little bird in his cabin, that was very tame, and used to be permitted to fly about the deck and rigging. It was loose on the morning of the arrival, and when the tooter came alongside, innocently perched on his shoulder. In an instant the quick-eyed guardians observed it. The poor tooter was declared compromised by the contact. He was hurried off to the lazaretto, in spite of his protestations and arguments, for ten days; and the engineer, as owner of the bird, was compelled to pay all the expenses of his incarceration.

The other case was more annoying still. In every lazaretto is a place called the parlatorio, at which the inmates may communicate with their friends. It is very like the grating used for the same purpose at our prisons. There is a double wall of bars, with a space of six or seven feet between them; and articles are pushed backwards and forwards on boards which run across communist bulgaria tour, in boxes fixed to poles. A person in quarantine received a visit from a friend on the first day of his confinement. Laden with treasures of travel, he was exhibiting some beautiful feathers to his friend, when a sudden puff of wind dispersed the collection, and by an evil chance blew one between the bars into the bosom of his innocent visitor.

The unfortunate weight

The unfortunate weight was directly condemned. All egress was denied him; he was told that, of all things, feathers were peculiarly susceptible of plague; and he had to join his friend for the whole term of his imprisonment. In fine, the laws of quarantine appear to be the most rigid of any existing, and cannot by any influence or interest, be evaded. This is not so much to be wondered at when the various incomes derived from enforcing them are taken into consideration; and, indeed, this appears to be, at present, the sole cause of their continuance.

There was a large quantity of beasts of burden awaiting the turn-out—camels, horses, and donkeys. The boys who attended the latter were sad young scamps—little dusky chaps with nothing on but what seemed to be a long blue bedgown. When a stranger appeared, they caught their donkeys by the head, and backed them, all in a heap, against him. In vain the valet beat them furiously about the head, face, and naked legs. They only fell back for an instant, and then all returned to the charge again, shouting, “ I say, master—good jackass ! ” Somehow or another, I was hustled on to one of the donkeys—I am sure I don’t know how; I never chose one—and then we set off at a quick easy amble towards Alexandria.