Quite a pretty English garden has been laid out in Pera, commanding a fine view of the Bosphorus.  There is a coffee-house in the centre, with tables and chairs outside, where you can sip your coffee and enjoy the view at the same time.  The Turks make coffee quite differently from us.  The berry is carefully roasted and then reduced to powder in a mortar.  A brass cup, in shape like a dice-box with a long handle, is filled with water and brought to a boil over a brasier of coals:  the coffee is placed in a similar brass dice-box and the boiling water poured on it.  This boils up once, and is then poured into a delicate little china cup half the size of an after-dinner coffee-cup, and for a saucer you have what resembles a miniature bouquet-holder of silver or gilt filigree.  If you take it in true Turkish style, you will drink your coffee without sugar, grounds and all; but a little sugar, minus the coffee-mud at the bottom, is much nicer.  Coffee seems to be drunk everywhere and all the time by the Turks.  The cafes are frequent, where they sit curled up on the divans dreamily smoking and sipping their fragrant coffee or hearing stories in the flowery style of the Arabian Nights.  At the street corners the coffee-vender squats before his little charcoal brasier and drives a brisk business.  If you are likely to prove a good customer at the bazaar, you are invited to curl yourself up on the rug on the floor of the booth, and are regaled with coffee.  Do you make a call or visit a harem, the same beverage is immediately offered.  Even in the government offices, while waiting for an interview with some grandee, coffee is frequently passed round.  Here it is particularly acceptable, for without its sustaining qualities one could hardly survive the slow movements of those most deliberate of all mortals, the Turkish officials.

A few days after our arrival my friend of the steamer, Madame A——­, the pretty Austrian bride, invited me to breakfast, and sent her husband’s brother, a fine-looking young Greek, to escort me to her house.  He spoke only Greek and Italian—­I neither:  however, he endeavored to beguile the way by conversing animatedly in Italian.  As he gazed up at the sun several times, inhaled with satisfaction the exhilarating air and pointed to the sparkling waters of the Bosphorus and the distant hills, I presumed he was dilating on the fine weather and the glorious prospect.  Not to be outdone in politeness, I smiled a great deal and replied to the best of my ability in good square English, to which he always assented, “Yes, oh yes!” which seemed to be all the English he knew.  Fortunately, our walk was not long, and Madame A——­ was our interpreter during the breakfast.  Her husband was absent.

[Illustration:  SERAGLIO POINT.  GOLDEN HORN.]