These dogs are the scavengers of the city.  That is their official position, and a hard one it is.  However, it is their protection.  But for their usefulness in partially cleansing these terrible streets, they would not be tolerated long.  They eat any thing and every thing that comes in their way, from melon rinds and spoiled grapes up through all the grades and species of dirt and refuse to their own dead friends and relatives—­and yet they are always lean, always hungry, always despondent.  The people are loath to kill them—­do not kill them, in fact.  The Turks have an innate antipathy to taking the life of any dumb animal, it is said.  But they do worse.  They hang and kick and stone and scald these wretched creatures to the very verge of death, and then leave them to live and suffer.

Once a Sultan proposed to kill off all the dogs here, and did begin the work—­but the populace raised such a howl of horror about it that the massacre was stayed.  After a while, he proposed to remove them all to an island in the Sea of Marmora.  No objection was offered, and a ship-load or so was taken away.  But when it came to be known that somehow or other the dogs never got to the island, but always fell overboard in the night and perished, another howl was raised and the transportation scheme was dropped.

So the dogs remain in peaceable possession of the streets.  I do not say that they do not howl at night, nor that they do not attack people who have not a red fez on their heads.  I only say that it would be mean for me to accuse them of these unseemly things who have not seen them do them with my own eyes or heard them with my own ears.

I was a little surprised to see Turks and Greeks playing newsboy right here in the mysterious land where the giants and genii of the Arabian Nights once dwelt—­where winged horses and hydra-headed dragons guarded enchanted castles—­where Princes and Princesses flew through the air on carpets that obeyed a mystic talisman—­where cities whose houses were made of precious stones sprang up in a night under the hand of the magician, and where busy marts were suddenly stricken with a spell and each citizen lay or sat, or stood with weapon raised or foot advanced, just as he was, speechless and motionless, till time had told a hundred years!

It was curious to see newsboys selling papers in so dreamy a land as that.  And, to say truly, it is comparatively a new thing here.  The selling of newspapers had its birth in Constantinople about a year ago, and was a child of the Prussian and Austrian war.

There is one paper published here in the English language—­The Levant Herald—­and there are generally a number of Greek and a few French papers rising and falling, struggling up and falling again.  Newspapers are not popular with the Sultan’s Government.  They do not understand journalism.  The proverb says, “The unknown is always great.”  To the court, the newspaper is a mysterious and rascally