has had the misfortune to fall into its terrible
jaws. Grimani, as a dragoman, is obliged to
accompany him, to help him to converse with the
prisoners. Will I, as a searcher for truth, even
in dark places, favour them with my company?
I shall see what prisons were at home, two
hundred years ago, and understand what Howard
has done for England. Of course I will go, in
spite of vermin or fever.

Off we went, hiring the kijik of "Pull away
Joe," a well known old Turk, much patronised
during the Crimean war; who, grinning
perpetually at us, and continually repeating the
different imaginary sums he expected to get, and
which, put into piastres, would have gone a good
way towards buying a sheep, soon landed us in
water, black as the Thames, from the
disemboguing sewers of the prison, at the steps
nearest to the Bagnio, and close to the Arsenal,
where (as in all other arsenals) timber was being
dragged about, and adzes were splitting and
chipping it. Dr. Opinkoff was telling me at the time
how many stabbing cases he had among the
Turks and the Greeks, and how specially
dangerous and past surgery these knife wounds
generally were, being always aimed with dreadful,
bloodthirsty, anatomical instinct.

"When they strike they make sure," said the
doctor, with a sort of professional approval, a
little checked by his moral convictions not quite
going all the way with him; "they go straight
for the heart, and generally find out where it
is." Then, assuming a confidential and chatty
whisper, he went on talking of the prison
diseases. "We have elephantiasis here, low
fevers, and a good deal of insanity. The Turkish
practice is wretched; nothing but burning verses
of the Koran, and then making the ashes into
medicine. I have known a pasha call in six
doctors, consult them all separately, and take all
their medicine, mixed together in a basin."

Here the prison gates opened, and Grimani
went up to get leave of the pasha, who was
smoking in some snug kiosk, undisturbed by the
curses and quarrels of the galley slaves, or the
purgatorial clink of their heavy chains. We
waited in a vestibule between the palisaded
gates, the turnkeys swinging their keys upon
their fingers, while Grimani the stalwart,
with the bearing of a Crusader, strode off
with his heavy whip under his arm, more as if
he was going to bastinado the pasha than to beg
a favour of him, and load him with flowery
Eastern compliments.

Here, on strolling out to chat under the shade
of a large, jagged leafed plane-tree (favourite tree
of the Turks) that stood on the shores of the
Bosphorus, not far from the prison gate, Dr.
Opinkoff prepared me for what I should see, as
he could not, he said, tell his companion a
prisoner's crimes before his face, or in the transit
from one part of the prison to another.

I was not to expect trim iron doors, neat
turnkeys, shining clean floors, and quiet, separate
cells, as in Europe. This was a prison of the
middle ages, such as Shakespeare had sketched
in his Measure for Measure. Here the prisoners
of all crimes, and all ages, were thrown
together in one festering heap of vice and misery,
to be tried when this pasha chose, and if
acquitted, to be released when that pasha found
time to write out his release.

"I should see," Dr. Opinkoff went on,
"pashas of rank herding with men who had
committed murders which only Omniscience could
count up. Either here or at the Zaptie, a
temporary prison only, there was a pasha who was
seized last week for forging (keiman) Turkish
bank-notes. Did I see that grave gentlemanly
man now leaning against the bars?"

I did.

"Well, that is a feverish subject, a patient of
mine, once a pasha of high rank, but he robbed
a government courier of a large sum of money,
which his official position gave him opportunities
of knowing was to be sent on a certain day from
the capital to some distant pashalik. His
accomplice was a sort of steward of his.
Perpetually afraid of being betrayed, he could not
rest night or day till he had got rid of this
instrument of his guilt. At last, having the
steward seized, accusing him of some
imaginary crime, he had him kept three days in
a dry well (like Joseph—so unchangeable are
Eastern types), and then sold him as a slave
into Circassia. There, he would have pined out
a miserable life, had not Fortune chosen the
poor slave as a special subject for her bounty,
and had not the avenging angel selected the guilty
and too confident pasha as a sinner peculiarly ripe
for the sword of Justice. By some singular chance,
the 'destiny,' as the Turks call it, of the slave,
led him and' his master down to Trebizond, where,
while working on the quay, he was seen and
interrogated by an old Constantinople friend, who
was astonished at seeing one alive whom he had
thought dead. Horrified at his story, the good
Turk hurried home to Stamboul to disclose all,
and procured the restoration of the innocent
sufferer and the punishment of the guilty pasha.
You will see my patient next week in rags
chained by the leg, or playing at cards with
some half-crazed desperado."

So we chatted under a plane-tree, but to us
thus chatting, not forsaken by the gods, came
swift-footed Grimani, and with winged words,
said:

"Come, look alive, you fellows! It's all right
with the pashaw. Come!"

So we entered the portal where Hope never
enters, but sits weeping day and night, clinging
to the outer bars. While I was thinking how
"Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate" (Leave
every hope behind, ye who enter here!) would
look in Turkish, and wondering how Dante's
being a Turk would have affected his Divine
Comedy, the turnkeys ground open the locks
with a brutal smile, and we entered the inner
court.

"Febrous, febrous!" groaned the doctor,
sniffing the thick air of the turnkeys' room as
we passed the portal and found ourselves among
some two or three hundred wondering wretches,
the very lees and dregs of the Sick Man's city.