silk pocket-handkerchief to turn the leaves.  The Stamboul Bazaar well deserves its renown, since there is nothing else of its kind in the whole world to compare with it.  Its labyrinth of little stalls and shops if joined together in one straight line would extend for miles; and a whole day might be spent quite profitably in wandering around, watching the busy scenes of bargaining and manufacturing.  Here, in this bewildering maze of buying and selling, the peculiar life of the Orient can be seen to perfection; the “mysterious veiled lady” of the East is seen thronging the narrow traffic-ways and seated in every stall; water-venders and venders of carpooses (water-melons) and a score of different eatables are meandering through.  Here, if your guide be an honest fellow, he can pilot you into stuffy little holes full of antique articles of every description, where genuine bargains can be picked up; or, if he be dishonest, and in league with equally dishonest tricksters, whose places are antiquaries only in name, he can lead you where everything is basest imitation.  In the former case, if anything is purchased he comes in for a small and not undeserved commission from the shopkeeper, and in the latter for perhaps as much as thirty per cent.  I am told that one of these guides, when escorting a party of tourists with plenty of money to spend and no knowledge whatever of the real value or genuineness of antique articles, often makes as much as ten or fifteen pounds sterling a day commission.

On the way from the Bazaar we call at the Pigeon Mosque, so called on account of being the resort of thousands of pigeons, that have become quite tame from being constantly fed by visitors and surrounded by human beings.  A woman has charge of a store of seeds and grain, and visitors purchase a handful for ten paras and throw to the pigeons, who flock around fearlessly in the general scramble for the food.  At any hour of the day Mussulman ladies may be seen here feeding the pigeons for the amusement of their children.  From the Pigeon Mosque we ascend the Saraka Tower, the great watch-tower of Stamboul, from the summit of which the news of a fire in any part of the city is signalled, by suspending huge frame-work balls covered with canvas from the ends of projecting poles in the day, and lights at night.  Constant watch and ward is kept over the city below by men snugly housed in quarters near the summit, who, in addition to their duties as watchmen, turn an honest cherik occasionally by supplying cups of coffee to Visitors.

No fairer site ever greeted human vision than the prospect from the Tower of Saraka.  Stamboul, Galata, Pera, and Scutari, with every suburban village and resort for many a mile around, can be seen to perfection from the commanding height of Saraka Tower.  The guide can here point out every building of interest in Stamboul-the broad area of roof beneath which the busy scenes of Stamboul Bazaar are enacted from day