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“You began about the Sea of Marmora, Cousin, and here it is. I’ve had my middle finger on it ever since we found it, to keep the place.”

“Very good, Maggie. We were coming up the Sea of Marmora one evening, and drew near to Constantinople about sunrise. I knew we were near, but I could not see anything, because a thick white mist hung in front of us like a veil resting on the sea. We were near the mouth of the Bosphorus when the sun broke out, the white mist rose slowly, like the curtain of a theatre, and–more beautiful than any scene that human hands can ever paint–I saw the Queen of Cities glittering in the sunshine.”

“What made it glitter? Are the houses built of shiny stuff?”

“The houses are built of wood, but they are painted in many colours. The rounded domes of the mosques are white, and the minarets, tall, slender, and fretted, are white, with golden tops, or white and blue. I can give you no idea how beautifully the shapes of the mosques and minarets break the uniformity of the mass of houses, nor how the gay colours, the white and the gold, shone like gems against a cloudless blue sky when the mist rose. No princess in an Eastern fairy-tale ever dazzled and delighted the beholder by lifting her veil and displaying her beauty and her jewels more than my eyes were charmed when the veil was lifted from Constantinople, and I saw her lovely and sparkling in the sun.”

“Are the streets very beautiful when you get into them?”

“Ah, Fred, I am sorry to say–no. They are very dirty, and very narrow. But they are picturesque, and made doubly so by the fact that in them you meet people of all nations, in every kind of dress, gay with all colours of the rainbow.”

“Are there shops in the streets?”

“Most of the shops are all together in certain streets by themselves, forming what is called a Bazaar. But in the other streets there are a few, such as sweetmeat shops and coffee shops, where the old Turks go to drink thick black coffee, and smoke, and hear the news; and (if they wish it) to be shaved.”

“I thought Turks wore long beards?”

“The lower-class Turks, and the country ones, and those who like to follow the old fashions, wear beards, but they have their heads shaved, and wear the turban. Most modern Turks, Government officials, and so forth, shave off their beards and whiskers, and wear short hair and a moustache, with the fez, or cloth cap. The old-fashioned dress is much the handsomest, I think, and I am sorry it is dying out.”

“The poor women-Turks aren’t allowed to go out, are they, Cousin Peregrine?”

“Oh yes, they are, but they have to be veiled, and so bundled up that you can not only not tell one woman from another, but they hardly look like women at all–more like unsteady balloons, or inflated sacks of different colours. They wear yellow leather boots, and no stockings. Over the boots they wear large slippers, in which they shuffle along with a gait very little less awkward than the toddle of a cramp-footed lady in China. If they are ungraceful on foot, matters are not much better when they ride. Sitting astride a donkey (for they do not use side-saddles), a Turkish lady is about as comical an object as you could wish to behold, though I have no doubt she is quite unconscious of looking anything but dignified, as she presses on to her shopping in the Bazaar, screaming to the half-naked Arab donkey-boy to urge on her steed with his stick. As the great cloak dress, in which women envelop themselves from head to foot when they go out, is all of one colour, they have this advantage over Englishwomen out shopping, that they do not look ugly from being bedizened with ill-assorted hues and frippery trimmings. In fact a mass of Turkish women, each clothed in one shade of colour, looks very like a flower-bed–a flower-bed of sole-coloured tulips without stalks!”