importunities never for a moment cease.  Finally the annoyance becomes so unbearable that the proprietor takes pity on my harassed head, and, after talking quite angrily to the crowd, locks me up in the same room with the bicycle.  Iron bars guard the rear windows of the houses at Eski Baba, and ere I am fairly stretched out on my mat several swarthy faces appear at the bars, and several voices simultaneously join in the dread chorus of, " Bin, bin, bin, monsieur! bin, bin.” compelling me to close, in the middle of a hot day-the rain having ceased about ten o’clock-the one small avenue of ventilation in the stuffy little room.  A moment’s privacy is entirely out of the question, for, even with the window closed, faces are constantly peering in, eager to catch even the smallest glimpse of either me or the bicycle.  Fate is also against me to-day, plainly enough, for ere I have been imprisoned in the room an hour the door is unlocked to admit the mulazim (lieutenant of gendarmes), and two of his subordinates, with long cavalry swords dangling about their legs, after the manner of the Turkish police.

In addition to puzzling their sluggish brains about my passport, my strange means of locomotion, and my affairs generally, they have now, it seems, exercised their minds up to the point that they ought to interfere in the matter of my revolver.  But first of all they want to see my wonderful performance of riding a thing that cannot stand alone.  After I have favored the gendarmes and the assembled crowd by riding once again, they return the compliment by tenderly escorting me down to police headquarters, where, after spending an hour or so in examining my passport, they place that document and my revolver in their strong box, and lackadaisically wave me adieu.  Upon returning to the mehana, I find a corpulent pasha and a number of particularly influential Turks awaiting my reappearance, with the same diabolical object of asking me to “bin! bin!” Soon afterward come the two Mohammedan priests, with the same request; and certainly not less than half a dozen times during the afternoon do I bring out the bicycle and ride, in deference to the insatiable curiosity of the sure enough “unspeakable” Turk; and every separate time my audience consists not only of the people personally making the request, but of the whole gesticulating male population.  The proprietor of the mehana kindly takes upon himself the office of apprising me when my visitors are people of importance, by going through the pantomime of swelling his features and form up to a size corresponding in proportion relative to their importance, the process of inflation in the case of the pasha being quite a wonderful performance for a man who is not a professional contortionist.