The denizens of great cities, whose weary eyes are doomed to rest eternally on long rows of buildings, unrelieved by anything softer or fresher than brownstone or marble fronts, thirst for an occasional glimpse of Nature, so healing to jaded mind and wearied body.  So universal is this sentiment that provision for gratifying it is not confined to the cities which our modern civilization has reared, nor do the capitals of Christendom alone boast of their parks and similar places of resort.  In effete and uncivilized Turkey the “institution” has long been established, and still flourishes; and the “Sweet Waters of Constantinople” draw quite as well, as regards both male and female visitors, as either Fairmount, Central or Hyde Park, or even the Bois de Boulogne, to which far-famed resort of all that is wise, wicked or witty in Paris these Turkish parks most nearly assimilate.

One of the two “Valleys of the Sweet Waters” is on the European, the other on the Asiatic, side of the Bosphorus.  The former is more frequented by the Greek and other Christian populations, while the latter is chiefly resorted to by the higher classes among the Turks and the veiled ladies of their hareems, and is often visited by the sultan himself.

To the Asiatic Sweet Waters you must go by boat, or rather by caique, a peculiar little frail cockle-shell of a conveyance, rowed by the most truculent-looking and unmitigated ruffians, Turkish or Grecian, to be found on any waters or in any land, Christian or heathen.  Picturesque in costume and exceedingly ragged and dirty, with the most cut-throat expression of face possible to conceive of, when you entrust your person and purse to their tender mercies you involuntarily remember with satisfaction that you insured your life for a good round sum before leaving your native country, and that this is one of the risks it covers.

To the European Sweet Waters you may go by carriage, but if wise will go there also by caique; for even the corduroy roads of our Southern country, so famous for their dislocating qualities, can be paralleled by the so-called road over which once (and once only), for our sins, we suffered ourselves to be shaken, not driven.  It is the fashion at Constantinople to visit the Asiatic Sweet Waters only on Friday (the Mussulman Sabbath), and the European Sweet Waters on Sunday; and on those days all that may be seen of Turkish ladies is on full exhibition.

If you select the Asiatic Sweet Waters for your visit, you go down to the wharf at Tophane, where the rival boatmen (caiquejees) raise as loud a din and make as fierce a fight for your person and piastres as you ever encountered on your arrival at New York in a European steamer from rival hack-drivers or hotel “touters.”  Pulled, pushed and shoved about in all directions as fiercely as ever was the body of Patroclus in the Iliad, when Greek and Trojan contended for possession of it, you are at last hustled into a caique, and deposited in the