No; the streets of Stamboul are grave,
solemn, almost monastic. No files of men
with sandwich boards, no cripples on trenchers, no
blind men and curs, no old women and dancing
dogs, no barrel-organs or white mice, no
distressed mechanics or sham fits, with placards,
"Don't bleed me—give me brandy-and-water,"
ready written, clenched in their stiff right hands;
in fact, seldom anything amusing in the way of
sham misery—by day, frothing at the mouth
with soft soap, and at night revelling on beef-
steak suppers—but only here and there a poor
doubled-up old hag, with ophthalmic eyes,
crouched under a wall, with a cup-like hand
held out, as she chants verses from the Koran,
in that horrible, nasal, monotone peculiar
to the Turks. Oftener, you meet the
santon, rather mad—if you may believe his
eyes—begging for a Dervish brotherhood; or a
wandering fakir, with dirty elf locks, perhaps
from India, in streaming robes, and with the
usual wooden shoe (for alms) slung by a chain
to his arm. His begging is so insolent and
imperious that it reminds you of the old soldier in
Gil Bias. Two causes keep down Turkish
mendicancy: the first, the few wants of a Turk;
the second, the charity of their richer men.
Where a cake and a few figs are food for the day,
and where alms are largely given, and alms-giving
forms part of the religious creed, there cannot
be much distress.

Hence it is that the beggars bear away rather
to the Frank side of the city, and haunt the
bazaars and places where foolish and rich Franks
are wont to congregate. The bridge of boats
is their special resort. Here, just a few feet
from the toll lodges, at imminent risk of death
from bullock carts and arabas, they squat in rows,
some twenty at each end, and remain there all
day, clacking out their songs and hymns, and
pattering supplications in the name of Allah and
the Prophet. Stop a moment from curiosity, or
detained by the crowd, and they open upon you
like a pack of hounds, chattering, and singing,
and shaking the show pence in their brass bowls
and their tin dishes.

How well I remember one old lady, with eyes
like red button-holes, with which she ogled me
with what she thought resembled motherly
affection! Next her was a dreadful monster
of a lean Arab, bared to the knee to exhibit,
with pardonable pride, a left pedestal that exactly
resembled, in colour and shape, a chair leg: the
knee standing for the ribbed ornament above,
the lower part, no larger round than an ebony
flute, for the shank. Once, too, I met three
blind men, walking along in file, ponderingly
and anxiously, each of them with his right hand
on the left shoulder of his predecessor, and the
first man, with a due sense of his responsibility
as Prime Minister—that is, blind leader of the
blind—groping with his hand along the white
wall of the Seraglio gardens. Sometimes I
encountered a sort of groping Elymas old man, led
about by a boy, who, shamefully indifferent to
the patriarch's optical infirmity, munched a peach
as he towed the senior along.

But Galata, that home of black cloth and
respectability slightly streaked here and there
with fraudulent bankruptcy, has street celebrities
of its own, and foremost among them is Baba, the
old crafty-looking woman decently robed in
white, who sits all day on the doorstep of one of
the Galata stores, swaying backwards and
forwards, chanting now an objectionable song, now
a hymn, according to the character of the person
whom she sees coming. She is as well known in
Galata by everybody, from the head banker to
the poorest clerk of a swindling house, as the
Lascar who sweeps the crossing at the Edgeware-
road is to West-end people, or the pretty Irish
girl who in June sells moss-roses at the
Exchange is to every stockbroker. Report says that
she is rich, and that young Galata merchants who,
for a joke, have pretended to be "hard up," and
have, to try her, asked their old pensioner, Baba,
for help, have received I don't know how many
silver piastres. Scandal says that Baba has
really ulterior motives in pretending to be a
beggar, that she is really a spy, and waits about
in public places to watch the movements of
certain people and their exits and entrances for
Russian or for French Government officials.
I can scarcely look at the sleek, dark woman's
crafty face and believe this; but I am, I
confess, inclined to accord with a still darker
rumour, which asserts that Baba is a sort of slave
merchants' agent, and that, when men are to be
trusted, and are rich enough to be depended
on, this Satanic matron arranges with them the
traffic of beautiful Georgians' bodies and souls.
Yet who would think that in busy London streets
that man who ran against you with his heavy
carpet-bag, and then took off his hat and begged
your pardon so civilly, had a dead murdered man's
body in it! In these days Satan, throwing off his
horns and clipping close his stinged tail, walks
amongst us with Inverness cape on and wears
kid gloves like the best of us. So Baba, though
outwards a decent, well-dressed matron, in
appearance not unlike our old Hindoo friend the
Begum of Bangalore, may, after all, be a vile,
concealed slave-dealer.

But though Baba never let me pass without a
smile and greeting, and a cry for "the smallest
money," my special pet, among the objects of
Constantinople, was Nano Pupisillo, the Greek
dwarf, a little microscopic man whom you might
have put in a band-box without difficulty. I
first saw him one day that I was scaling the hill
of Pera. Butted by porters, and jostled by
asses, laden with everything from peaches to
brickbats, I was looking into a tobacconist's
window, not far from the great Genoese tower,
just to rest myself.

Suddenly, at my elbow, I heard coming up, as
if out from the very wall that lined the road, a
little, lisping, attenuated falsetto voice, such as
you would fancy would have proceeded from an
Irish leprechaun, or such as Æsop must have heard
when Wisdom spoke to him from the lips of
tortoise or of bullfrog. If the wall had itself
addressed me in an Eastern apologue, like the
faded vision of Mirza, such a voice I should have