among the hurrying feet, are the famed dogs of Constantinople; drifting noiselessly about are squads of Turkish women, draped from chin to feet in flowing robes, and with snowy veils bound about their heads, that disclose only the eyes and a vague, shadowy notion of their features.  Seen moving about, far away in the dim, arched aisles of the Great Bazaar, they look as the shrouded dead must have looked when they walked forth from their graves amid the storms and thunders and earthquakes that burst upon Calvary that awful night of the Crucifixion.  A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once—­not oftener.

And then there was the goose-rancher—­a fellow who drove a hundred geese before him about the city, and tried to sell them.  He had a pole ten feet long, with a crook in the end of it, and occasionally a goose would branch out from the flock and make a lively break around the corner, with wings half lifted and neck stretched to its utmost.  Did the goose-merchant get excited?  No.  He took his pole and reached after that goose with unspeakable sang froid—­took a hitch round his neck, and “yanked” him back to his place in the flock without an effort.  He steered his geese with that stick as easily as another man would steer a yawl.  A few hours afterward we saw him sitting on a stone at a corner, in the midst of the turmoil, sound asleep in the sun, with his geese squatting around him, or dodging out of the way of asses and men.  We came by again, within the hour, and he was taking account of stock, to see whether any of his flock had strayed or been stolen.  The way he did it was unique.  He put the end of his stick within six or eight inches of a stone wall, and made the geese march in single file between it and the wall.  He counted them as they went by.  There was no dodging that arrangement.

If you want dwarfs—­I mean just a few dwarfs for a curiosity—­go to Genoa.  If you wish to buy them by the gross, for retail, go to Milan.  There are plenty of dwarfs all over Italy, but it did seem to me that in Milan the crop was luxuriant.  If you would see a fair average style of assorted cripples, go to Naples, or travel through the Roman States.  But if you would see the very heart and home of cripples and human monsters, both, go straight to Constantinople.  A beggar in Naples who can show a foot which has all run into one horrible toe, with one shapeless nail on it, has a fortune—­but such an exhibition as that would not provoke any notice in Constantinople.  The man would starve.  Who would pay any attention to attractions like his among the rare monsters that throng the bridges of the Golden Horn and display their deformities in the gutters of Stamboul?  O, wretched impostor!  How could he stand against the three-legged woman, and the man with his eye in his cheek?  How would he blush in presence of the man with fingers on his elbow?  Where would he hide himself when the dwarf with seven fingers on each hand, no upper lip, and his under-jaw gone, came down in his majesty?  Bismillah!  The cripples of Europe are a delusion and a fraud.  The truly gifted flourish only in the by-ways of Pera and Stamboul.