attentions — close, inasmuch as they keep their horses’ noses almost against my back, in spite of sundry subterfuges to shake them off.  When I stop they do likewise, and when I start again they deliberately follow, altogether too near to be comfortable.  They are, all four, rough-looking peasants, and their object is quite unaccountable, unless they are doing it for “pure cussedness,” or perhaps with some vague idea of provoking me into doing something that would offer them the excuse of attacking and robbing me.  The road is sufficiently lonely to invite some such attention.  If they are only following me to see what I do with the bicycle, they return but little enlightened, since they see nothing but trundling and an occasional scraping off of mud.  At the end of about two miles, whatever their object, they give it up.  Several showers occur during the afternoon, and the distance travelled has been short and unsatisfactory, when just before dark I arrive at Eski Baba, where I am agreeably surprised to find a mehana, the proprietor of which is a reasonably mannered individual.  Since getting into Turkey proper, reasonably mannered people have seemed wonderfully scarce, the majority seeming to be most boisterous and headstrong.  Next to the bicycle the Turks of these interior villages seem to exercise their minds the most concerning whether I have a passport; as I enter Eski Baba; a gendarme standing at the police-barrack gates shouts after me to halt and produce “passaporte.”  Exhibiting my passport at almost every village is getting monotonous, and, as I am going to remain here at least overnight, I ignore the gendarme’s challenge and wheel on to the mehana.  Two gendarmes are soon on the spot, inquiring if I have a “passaporte;” but, upon learning that I am going no farther to-day, they do not take the trouble to examine it, the average Turkish official religiously believing in never doing anything to-day that can be put off till to-morrow.

The natives of a Turkish interior village are not over-intimate with newspapers, and are in consequence profoundly ignorant, having little conception of anything, save what they have been familiar with and surrounded by all their lives, and the appearance of the bicycle is indeed a strange visitation, something entirely beyond their comprehension.  The mehana is crowded by a wildly gesticulating and loudly commenting and arguing crowd of Turks and Christians all the evening.  Although there seems to be quite a large proportion of native unbelievers in Eski Baba there is not a single female visible on the streets this evening; and from observations next day I judge it to be a conservative Mussulman village, where the Turkish women, besides keeping themselves veiled with orthodox strictness, seldom go abroad, and the women who are not Mohammedan, imbibing something of the retiring spirit of the dominant race, also keep themselves well in the background.  A round score of dogs, great and small, and in all possible conditions of