so far as bicycles are concerned, consists simply in a belief in the superiority of their own particular powers of penetration.  But to the only person aboard the steamer who really does know anything at all about the subject, the chief end of their exposition seems to be gained when they have duly impressed upon the minds of their hearers that the bicycle is to ride on, and that it goes at a rate of speed quite beyond the comprehension of their — the auditors’ — minds; “Bin, bin, bin.  Chu, chu, chu.  Haidi, haidi, haidi.” being repeated with a vehemence that is intended to impress upon them little less than flying-Dutchman speed.

The deck of a Constantinople steamer affords splendid opportunity for character study, and the Ismidt packet is no exception.  Nearly every person aboard has some characteristic, peculiar and distinct from any of the others.  At intervals of about fifteen minutes a couple of Armenians, bare-footed, bare-legged, and ragged, clamber with much difficulty and scraping of shins over a large pile of empty chicken-crates to visit one particular crate.  Their collective baggage consists of a thin, half-grown chicken tied by both feet to a small bag of barley, which is to prepare it for the useful but inglorious end of all chickendom.  They have imprisoned their unhappy charge in a crate that is most difficult to get at.  Why they didn’t put it in one of the nearer crates, what their object is in climbing up to visit it so frequently, and why they always go together, are problems of the knottiest kind.

A far less difficult riddle is the case of a middle-aged man, whose costume and avocation explain nothing, save that he is not an Osmanli.  He is a passenger homeward bound to one of the coast villages, and he constantly circulates among the crowd with a basket of water-melons, which he has brought aboard “on spec,” to vend among his fellow-passengers, hoping thereby to gain sufficient to defray the cost of his passage.  Seated on whatever they can find to perch upon, near the canvas partition, all unmoved by the gay and stirring scenes before them, is a group of Mussulman pilgrims from some interior town, returning from a pilgrimage to Stamboul — fine-looking Osmanli graybeards, whose haughty reserve not even the bicycle is able to completely overcome, although it proves more efficacious in subduing it and waking them out of their habitual contemplative attitude than anything else aboard.  Two of these men are of magnificent physique; their black eyes, rather full lips, and swarthy skins betraying Arab blood.  In addition to the long daggers and antiquated pistols so universally worn in the Orient, they are armed with fine, large, pearl-handled revolvers, and they sit cross-legged, smoking cigarette after cigarette in silent meditation, paying no heed even to the merry music and the dancing of the Greeks.