matter of some wonderment that the Turks, instead of hauling material for their road from a distance did not save expense by merely breaking the stones of the old causeway and using the same road-bed.  Twice to-day I have been required to produce my passport, and when toward evening I pass through a small village, the lone gendarme who is smoking a nargileh in front of the mehana where I halt points to my revolver and demands “passaporte,” I wave examination, so to speak, by arguing the case with him, and by the not always unhandy plan of pretending not exactly to comprehend his meaning.  “Passaporte! passaporte! gendarmerie, me, " replies the officer, authoritatively, in answer to my explanation of a voyager being privileged to carry a revolver; while several villagers who have gathered around us interpose “Bin! bin! monsieur, bin! bin.”  I have little notion of yielding up either revolver or passport to this village gendarme, for much of their officiousness is simply the disposition to show off their authority and satisfy their own personal curiosity regarding me, to say nothing of the possibility of coming in for a little backsheesh.  The villagers are worrying me to “bin! bin!” at the same time the gendarme is worrying me about the revolver and passport, and knowing from previous experience that the gendarme would never stop me from mounting, being quite as anxious to witness the performance as the villagers, I quickly decide upon killing two birds with one stone, and accordingly mount, and pick my way along the rough street out on to the Constantinople road.  The gloaming settles into darkness, and the domes and minarets of Stamboul, which have been visible from the brow of every hill for several miles back, are still eight or ten miles away, and rightly judging that the Ottoman Capital is a most bewildering city for a stranger to penetrate after night, I pillow my head on a sheaf of oats, within sight of the goal toward which I have been pedalling for some 2,500 miles since leaving Liverpool.  After surveying with a good deal of satisfaction the twinkling lights that distinguish every minaret in Constantinople each night during the fast of Ramadan, I fall asleep, and enjoy, beneath a sky in which myriads of far-off lamps seem to be twinkling mockingly at the Ramadan illuminations, the finest night’s repose I have had for a week.  Nothing but the prevailing rains have prevented me from sleeping beneath the starry dome entirely in peference to putting up at the village mehanas.

En route into Stamboul, on the following morning, I meet the first train of camels I have yet encountered; in the gray of the morning, with the scenes around so thoroughly Oriental, it seems like an appropriate introduction to Asiatic life.  Eight o’clock finds me inside the line of earthworks thrown up by Baker Pasha when the Russians were last knocking at the gates of Constantinople, and ere long I am trundling through the crooked streets of the Turkish Capital