A pleasant day in Batoum, and we take passage aboard a Messageries Maritimes steamer for Constantinople.  Late at night we depart, amid the glare and music of a violent thunder-storm, and in the morning wake up in the roadstead of Trebizond.

To fully realize the difference between mock-civilization and the genuine article, one cannot do better than to transfer from a Russian Caspian steamer to a Messageries Maritimes.  The Russians affect French methods and manners in pretty much everything; but the thinness and transparency of the varnish becomes very striking in contrast aboard the steamers.

The scenery along the Anatolian coast is striking and lovely in the extreme as we steam along in full view of it all next day.  It is mountainous the whole distance, but the prospect is charmingly variable.  Sometimes the mountains are heavily wooded down to the water’s edge, and sometimes the slopes are prettily chequered with clearings and cultivation.

More and more lovely it grows next day, as we pass Samsoon, celebrated throughout the East for chibouque tobacco; Sinope, memorable as the place where the first blow of the Crimean War was delivered; and, on the morning of the third day, Ineboli, the “town of wines.”

On the evening of the third day we lay off the entrance to the Bosphorus till morning, when we steam down that charming strait to Constantinople.  It is almost a year since I took, in company with our friend Shelton Bey, a pleasure trip up the Bosphorus and gazed for the first time on its wondrous beauties.  I have seen considerable since, but the Bosphorus looks as fresh and lovely as ever.

While yielding as full a measure of praise to the Bosphorus as any of its most ardent admirers, I would, however, at the same time, recommend those in search of lovely coast scenery to take a coasting voyage along the southern shore of the Black Sea in June.  I have no hesitation in saying that the traveller who goes into raptures over the beauties of the Bosphorus would, if he saw it, include the whole Anatolian coast to Batoum.

Several very pleasant days are spent in Constantinople, talking over my Central Asian adventures with former acquaintances and seeing the city.  But as these were pretty thoroughly described in Volume I., there is no need of repetition here.  With many regrets I part company with R, who has proved a very pleasant companion indeed, and set sail for India.

The steamers of the Khedivial Line, plying between Constaninople and Alexandria, have their mooring buoys near the Stamboul side of the Golden Horn, between Seraglio Point and the Galata bridge.  During the forenoon, Shelton Bey, R—­, and I had taken a caique and sought out from among the crowd of shipping in the harbor the steamship Behera, of the above-mentioned line, on which I have engaged my passage to Alexandria, so that we should have no difficulty in finding it in the afternoon.  In the afternoon the Behera