That three-legged woman lay on the bridge, with her stock in trade so disposed as to command the most striking effect—­one natural leg, and two long, slender, twisted ones with feet on them like somebody else’s fore-arm.  Then there was a man further along who had no eyes, and whose face was the color of a fly-blown beefsteak, and wrinkled and twisted like a lava-flow—­and verily so tumbled and distorted were his features that no man could tell the wart that served him for a nose from his cheek-bones.  In Stamboul was a man with a prodigious head, an uncommonly long body, legs eight inches long and feet like snow-shoes.  He traveled on those feet and his hands, and was as sway-backed as if the Colossus of Rhodes had been riding him.  Ah, a beggar has to have exceedingly good points to make a living in Constantinople.  A blue-faced man, who had nothing to offer except that he had been blown up in a mine, would be regarded as a rank impostor, and a mere damaged soldier on crutches would never make a cent.  It would pay him to get apiece of his head taken off, and cultivate a wen like a carpet sack.

The Mosque of St. Sophia is the chief lion of Constantinople.  You must get a firman and hurry there the first thing.  We did that.  We did not get a firman, but we took along four or five francs apiece, which is much the same thing.

I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia.  I suppose I lack appreciation.  We will let it go at that.  It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.  I believe all the interest that attaches to it comes from the fact that it was built for a Christian church and then turned into a mosque, without much alteration, by the Mohammedan conquerors of the land.  They made me take off my boots and walk into the place in my stocking-feet.  I caught cold, and got myself so stuck up with a complication of gums, slime and general corruption, that I wore out more than two thousand pair of boot-jacks getting my boots off that night, and even then some Christian hide peeled off with them.  I abate not a single boot-jack.

St. Sophia is a colossal church, thirteen or fourteen hundred years old, and unsightly enough to be very, very much older.  Its immense dome is said to be more wonderful than St. Peter’s, but its dirt is much more wonderful than its dome, though they never mention it.  The church has a hundred and seventy pillars in it, each a single piece, and all of costly marbles of various kinds, but they came from ancient temples at Baalbec, Heliopolis, Athens and Ephesus, and are battered, ugly and repulsive.  They were a thousand years old when this church was new, and then the contrast must have been ghastly—­if Justinian’s architects did not trim them any.  The inside of the dome is figured all over with a monstrous inscription in Turkish characters, wrought in gold mosaic, that looks as glaring as a circus bill; the pavements and the marble balustrades are all battered and dirty; the perspective is marred every