The most exciting things in Constantinople are the earthquakes.  We were afraid they would not have any while we were there, but they accommodated us with a very satisfactory one!  It upset my ink-bottle and broke the lamp and rattled everything in the room until I was delighted.  When my companion came in she was indignant to think that I had enjoyed the earthquake all to myself, for she was in the rooms of the American Bible Society, and being thus protected, did not feel it.  But I told her that that was her punishment for trying to prove that a missionary had cheated her, for she was not in that place for a godly purpose.

At another time, however, we met with better success in obtaining a sensation of a different sort.  We visited, in company with our Turkish friend, a small but wonderfully beautiful mosque not often seen by ordinary tourists, and afterwards went up on Galata tower to get the fine view of Constantinople which may be had there.  It was just before sunset again, and I am quite unable to make you see the utter loveliness of it.  We crawled out on the narrow ledge which surrounds the top, and I had just got a capital picture of my companion as she clutched the Turk to prevent being blown off, for the wind was something terrible, when suddenly the keepers rushed to the windows and jabbered excitedly in Turkish and ran up a flag, and behold, there was a fire!  Galata tower is the fire observatory.  By the flags they hoist you can tell where the fire is.  I never was at a fire in my life.  Even when our stables burned down I was away from home.  So here was my opportunity.  The way we drove down those narrow streets was enough to make one think that we were the fire department itself.  But when we arrived we found to our grief that it was our dear little mosque which was burning.  Undoubtedly we were the last visitors to enter it.

We went back to the hotel for dinner, and about nine o’clock, hearing that the fire was spreading, we drove down again with our Turk, who regarded it as no unusual thing to take American women to two fires in the same day.  We found the tenement-houses burning.  Our carriage gave us no vantage-ground, so our friend, who speaks twelve languages, obtained permission to enter a house and go up on the roof.  We never stopped to think that we might catch all sorts of diseases; we were so pleased at the courtesy of the poor souls.  They had all their poor belongings packed ready to remove if the fire crept any nearer, but they ran ahead and lighted us up the dark stairway with candles, and told us in Turkish what an honor we were doing their house, all of which touched me deeply.  I wondered how many people I would have assisted up to our roof if my clothes were tied up in sheets in the hall, with the fire not a square away!

Fortunately, it came no nearer, and from that high, flat roof we watched the seething mass of yellow flames grow less and less and then go completely under control.  It was Providence which did it, however, and not the Constantinople fire department, with its little streams of water the size of slate-pencils!