veiled Jezabels sitting under walnut and plane
trees, taking coffee and talking frivolous and
mischievous scandal, can be only amusing for
the first time. To see the poor women sloughing
along in loose, soft, yellow boots; to see Turkish
babies, in pink jackets and trousers (skeleton
suit) and tiny fezes, tumbling about in a negress's
lap; to see Croat gardeners, Crim Tartars in
grey wool caps and pink trousers, Hindoo
fakirs swinging hollow pumpkin alms-dishes,
hideous beggars with elephantiasis arms as
large as brown bolsters, Montenegrins, Bulgarian
vine-dressers, Anatolian shepherds in black
sheep-skins, boatmen, Circassians, Armenians, sherbet
sellers, dervishes royal in their rags, Persians in
receding black caps, pashas with beards dyed a
ruddy brown with henna, boys smeared between
the eyes with black to keep off the evil eye, fat
captains on horses grand with gold-embroidered
saddle-cloths,—to see these things, was to see
the sights which alone redeem this insufferably
dull place of amusement.

Was I then in that valley of Sweet Waters,
thinking only of the mottle of sun on the hills
around, on cypress-trees and red kiosk, and
stream and fountain? Was I rejoicing, like the
mere Pepys of travel, alone in the rolling satins
and the heaps of diamonds that, spread out,
would have covered that valley all over, from blue
Bosphorus to mountain? Had I no thoughts
of anything but the strolling-player look of everybody,
and of those gazelle eyes which I was
absurd enough to think just now brightened
and dilated as I stared at them in abstracted
wonder, careless of black footmen and eunuchs'
swords? Well; I was dreaming that I saw pale,
dripping spectres, with clinging cerements of
white, with paint washed off and undiamonded
hair, gliding about among those groups of slaves
and wives, wandering and gliding round the
circles of negresses who listen to the Nubian
flutes, passing unseen among the water-sellers
and past the plane-trees; with restless unhappy
vague search, as for some child or sister that
might be here; with a look of tender, heart-broken
reproach in their pale eyes, gliding round each
ox-waggon, and looking into every teleki, still
on the same endless search!

A ghost in sunshine? Why not? Is not
this the land of crime and horror? Have
not friends, whom I trust as my own soul, seen
over and over again poor dead women,
murdered, floating here on the Bosphorus in open
day? Have we not record, some years ago, of
women being drowned in this fatal water, in
open daylight, with crowds looking on? Are
not the hareems perpetual scenes of poisonings
and stranglings, the result of the accursed
system of polygamy? It is because I am fresh from
true stories such as these, that I see these ghosts
in the sunshine mingling with the brilliant
crowds.

But, to return to the women; must I say
what I thought of them, after scanning with
the care of a portrait-painter some thousand
faces; and must my reply be ungallant and
unfavourable? Truth says, " Yes; and speak out
like a man." The lower order of Turkish women
are almost invariably ugly, always dwarfish in
stature, with staring dark eyes, fleshy stupid
bowsprit noses that protrude through the often
dusty yashmak, and " hog mouths," as an old
Stamboul resident characterises them to me.
In walking, what with their sloppy boots and
their awkward dress, their gait is a slatternly
shuffle, painful to see, and ungraceful as the
waddle of a swan.

The higher classes, especially the Circassians, in
extreme youth are often as lovely as imagination
can conceive; but they soon get old, and then
their white skin becomes of a soft nankeen
leather colour. What with the tons of sweetmeats
they eat, the want of exercise, and the trying
vicissitudes of the climate, they are often
unhealthy, and the state of medicine (still even
in Europe rather empirical, in Turkey barbarous)
is such, that most of the serious diseases become
chronic. Painting is now fashionable in Turkey,
and every face I saw shadowing through a thin
white cloud of yashmak, was hideously ruddled
with rouge up to the very brows, which were
charcoaled with some black pigment—perhaps
the kohl that Eastern ladies use to dye the
eyelashes and eyelids with. The very lips seemed
stiff with cerement, and the skins that were not
hard red, were of a ghastly cosmeticised whiteness.
I saw all degrees of horror in rouge,
from a becoming perpetual hot blush, to that
sort of fiery dab that a butcher rubs upon a
doomed sheep's side. I am told, however, that
naturally the Turkish girl has skin of alabastrine
whiteness, with just a pale tinge of pink
such as there is on the cold leaves of a winter
rose. I am sadly afraid, poor creatures, that generally
their best beauty is of a sickly and artificial
character, inconsistent with all our ideas of sound
health and cultivated mind. The yashmak has
a strong tendency to drop off the face, as it has
really done in the last few years with most of the
Armenian women at Broussa; during the
Crimean war I am told that it got so alarmingly thin,
that the police at last arrested all women who
went about the streets or bazaars without the old
mask of the conventional thickness. I do not
deny that I saw certain houris of grace and
loveliness, with wonderful eyes of the " first
water" peeping through the vizors of their yashmaks,
but I think they were exceptional, and
I believe that, on a fine day in London,
Oxford-street alone would present more beauty
than was gathered together in all that Asian
valley.

But I must tear myself away from Zobeide
and Scheherazade; the frowning, rolling-eyed
blacks; the merry, good-tempered, motherly
negresses; the terrible tom-tom players; the
flutes and lutes; the water-sellers and the
chesnut-vendors: to take boat, and go back, quite the
opposite way, up the Golden Horn, to the other
park of Constantinople—the Sweet Waters of
Europe—where we must suppose ourselves, not
on the same day, but on the next Sunday, or on
one of the ever-recurring Greek festivals.

You may go there in three ways: either by caïque