In what I have said about society in Pera I have not meant to be personal or offensive in any way.  My object has been to show up a rotten system whereby everybody suffers.  I have some remote hope that things may change for the better, especially as one of the chief promoters of the system has now left Constantinople.

If I bring these pages to a somewhat abrupt conclusion, it is because I have had the bad luck to get a chill out shooting, and have been somewhat seriously ill.  However, I have hope that there is ’life in the old dog yet,’ and that I may before long have some other adventures of a similar description to add to these ‘unvarnished sketches’ of my life.

EXTRACT FROM THE ‘DAILY TELEGRAPH,’

June 21, 1886._

’There will be some slight and melancholy satisfaction to his sorrowing family, and his many friends, in the knowledge of the fact that Hobart Pasha, a short time before his death, had prepared for publication a memoir of his stirring life and adventures.  The only fault, if fault there be, in this record, may lie in the circumstance that its readers may think it too brief.  At all events, we shall be told what Hobart had been about ever since the year 1836.  It is certain that he never was idle.  Even before he had passed his examination for lieutenant, he had distinguished himself while serving in the squadron told off to suppress the slave trade in Brazilian waters:  and in those days our naval operations against the Portuguese traders in “blackbirds” involved considerable peril to life and limb.

’Eighteen years, however, elapsed before Captain Augustus Hobart was able to shot his guns in view of the broadside of a European foe.  He had previously enjoyed two years’ half-holiday at home; that is to say, he had been appointed, as a reward for his services in South America, to a lieutenancy on board the Royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, then commanded by the late Adolphus Fitz-Clarence.  But in the historically momentous year 1854 there was serious business to be done by Lieutenant—­now Commander—­Hobart.  A diplomatic squabble between France and Russia about the Holy Places in Palestine developed into an angry quarrel between the Emperor Nicholas, France, and England.  We went to war with Russia.  A magnificent squadron of British first-rates was despatched to the Black Sea with the avowed object of destroying the Russian Fleet, which had characteristically annihilated the Turkish Fleet in the harbour of Sinope.  We did not do much in the Black Sea beyond running the Tiger on shore, where her crew were captured by the Muscovites.  We bombarded Odessa perfunctorily, and precisely in that portion of the city where our shot and shell could do the least harm.  We did not destroy the Russian Fleet, for the sufficing reason that the Russian Commander-in-Chief sank all his three-deckers full fathom five in the harbour of Sebastopol.