audiences and petitions, of staving them off by
requesting the delighted men to visit such and
such an establishment, and draw up a long report,
which is handed over to the vizier for consideration.
This consideration takes so long, however,
that the affair never goes any further.

We have done jogging along, and are there.
It is a large building once—, perhaps, a pasha's
house—close to the great mosque of Sulieman,
which far exceeds St. Sophia both in internal
and external beauty. Our boy-grooms stop
a man with his long pipe stuck down his back
for safety, the red bowl rising slanting from
between his shoulders, and ask him where the
entrance door is? The man angrily growls
something about "Satan and infidels," and asks
if they take him for a patient that has escaped?
A second fellow, passing with a stand of roasted
Indian corn, yellow and mealy, shows us the
gate we desire, and we beat for admittance,
looking through the bars into a garden and a
long passage ending in an archway and court
beyond.

There is much parley at the door, which drives
Doctor Legoff to violent Ciceronianisms in dog
Latin, and to energetic protests drawn from a
combination of Delectus, Latin Grammar, and
the drawer-labels of chemists' shops. He
swears that the Turkish porter, an old man
who tumbles out of a lodge paved with a
feather-bed, must have had more than aqua pura
that morning; he declares that it is stark
dementia to exclude a Government commissioner;
that the porter is a fatuous old senex, febrous
with opium, with paralysis supervening; that
he (Dr. Legoff) will get in even if there is blood-
letting, for he must and will see Doctor
Tricoupi, the physician of the establishment.

Leaving his brass waiter full of rice and fowl,
and his pipe, and thimbleful of black coffee, the
old porter at last puts on his red slippers and
toddles off, fussy Polonius and pantaloon that
he is, to tell his master of the strangers, as he
might have done ten minutes ago.

We pass down the paved passage, and through a
portico where some quiet patients are sitting, and
where servants of the madhouse are drawing skinfuls
of water from the fountain, and are shown into
a little bare room, in the corner of a yard, where
the doctor receives us. Tricoupi is not a bit
like one of our own oiled, and scented, and bland,
and dulcet, nattering, fashionable doctors; on the
contrary, he is a short, small, quiet, sharp-nosed
Italian, kindly and rather cautious in manner.
A black boy presents us, on bended knee, and
with a conventional sweep and flourish, first, a
chibouk, and then a little cup of burning hot
black coffee, a la Turque. To the saffron
threads hanging over the great red saucer-bowls
of the chibouks that rest on the floor, another
boy, running in like an elf, squeezing a glowing
lump of charcoal between a small pair of silver
tongs, brings flames and fires.

I am sure, from Tricoupi's restless manner,
and the hurried way in which he shows us specimens
of mad artisans' handicraft, that he knows
our visit bodes him no good, and that we are, in fact,

come to report on the imperfections of the system
which he personifies. I dare say, if he dared, he
would poison us in the coffee, or throw us to
some raging, shaven Orson of a Turkish madman.
So he casts down his eyes and fences
with Legoff, who tries to look friendly and
innocent, and unobservant and admiring. He parries
all our questions, and never even mentions a
certain entry-book of cases. But one thing he
dare not smother up or refuse, and that is, the
madmen themselves. Legoff has power to go
anywhere in the Demir-Khan, and asking astute
Tricoupi's leave is a mere ceremony.

We entered the large court-yard of the
Demir-Khan, in the centre of which stood a
plane-tree and a covered fountain. Round this
quadrangle ran a dirty paved cloister, upon
which opened the doors of small cells on one side,
and on the other the doors of general dormitories
and the bath-rooms. From these little huts,
listlessly—from the bars of the windows, fiercely—
from idle groups squatting with their backs to
the wall, torpidly—everywhere madmen's faces
met ours. " Doing nothing," said Legoff, with a
sigh; "no amusement; no occupation; nothing
to remove the strain, and wear off the one dominant
idea that has subjected all the rest."

Tricoupi took the bright view of things, and
patted a ferocious-looking Hercules of a Turk
we were passing, on the back. "You see," he
said, "the religion of my poor invalids makes
them patient. Paroxysms are much less rare
than with you in Europe. 'Chismet' (it is de-
creed), they say; and resign themselves to
fetters and the shower-bath."

Suddenly, Tricoupi, waving aside the pale
absorbed-looking men who paced up and down
the cloister, regardless of our presence, or listening
eagerly but vacantly to Legoff's general
groans at the Turkish system of managing the
insane, flung open the door of a small cell. We
looked in, and saw, sitting on a small, poor
pallet, in a little whitewashed cabin of a room, a
tall, stiff-necked, gentlemanly man, of some forty
years old. His head and neck were bandaged,
and the white cloth gave great lustre to his dark
black moustache and thick curling beard, and
even to his serious deep-sunk eyes, that were
fixed on us pitifully yet irrationally. Tricoupi
asked after his health, and he returned some
restless, complaining, irrelevant answer.

"That," said Tricoupi, turning to us, and
lecturing upon the man as if he were a waxwork
figure, "is a Persian gentleman, whose mind
became afflicted from some decay of his
circumstances. Last week, being forbidden tobacco by
his doctor, he cut his throat in bed, leaving on
the table a letter stating that he had done the
deed himself, fearing his servant might be
accused of the crime." As he spoke, the Persian
gentleman bent his neck to us stiffly, as if guessing
the purport of our conversation.

On our way to the next cell, Tricoupi stopped
a moment before a row of men squatting along the
foot of the wall, to point out to us a young
Nubian black, with a thin, sad face the face of
a mad Puritan: so rapt and introspective were