told me that I really didn’t need his vise, but that he would put it on anyway because it would make the passports look more imposing.  Because we were going to Constantinople and Bucharest, whereas our passports were made out for “the Balkan States,” the American Consul would not vise them at all, on the ground that neither Turkey nor Roumania is in the Balkans.  About Roumania he was technically correct, but I think most geographers place European Turkey in the Balkans.  As things turned out, however, it was all labor lost and time thrown away, for we landed in Constantinople as untroubled by officials and inspectors as though we were stepping ashore at Twenty-third Street from a Jersey City ferry.

There were no regular sailings from Salonika for Constantinople, but, by paying a hundred dollars for a ticket which in pre-war days cost twenty, we succeeded in obtaining passage on an Italian tramp steamer.  The Padova was just such a cargo tub as one might expect to find plying between Levantine ports.  Though we occupied an officer’s cabin, for which we were charged Mauretania rates, it was very far from being as luxurious as it sounds, for I slept upon a mattress laid upon three chairs and the mattress was soiled and inhabited.  Still, it was very diverting, after an itching night, to watch the cockroaches, which were almost as large as mice, hurrying about their duties on the floor and ceiling.  Huddled under the forward awnings were two-score deck passengers—­Greeks, Turks, Armenians and Roumanians.  Sprawled on their straw-filled mattresses, they loafed the hot and lazy days away in playing cards, eating the black bread, olives and garlic which they had brought with them, smoking a peculiarly strong and villainous tobacco, and torturing native musical instruments of various kinds.  At night a young Turk sang plaintive, quavering laments to the accompaniment of a sort of guitar, some of the others occasionally joining in the mournful chorus.  I found my chief recreation, when it grew too dark to read, in watching an Orthodox priest, who was one of the deck-passengers, prepare for the night by combing and putting up his long and greasy hair.  Another of the deck-passengers was a rather prosperous-looking, middle-aged Levantine who had been in America making his fortune, he told me, and was now returning to his wife, who lived in a little village on the Dardanelles, after an absence of sixteen years.  She had no idea that he was coming, he said, as he had planned to surprise her.  Perhaps he was the one to be surprised.  Sixteen years is a long time for a woman to wait for a man, even in a country as conservative as Turkey.