Chapter 34 Summary

Twain starts this next chapter with a sardonic joke about hypocrisy. In Turkey, it is immoral to drink, but fine to have eight-hundred wives. The Americans gasp with shock over the allowable bigamy in Turkey, even though the same thing is practiced in Utah. But to place Turkey higher on the immorality scale than America, he reveals the fact that young girls are sold in auctions. Even though the auctions are no longer public as they used to be, they still exist.

Constantinople has a legend of being packed with dogs. Twain wants to see this for himself, but discovers that the legend is a little less exotic than he imagined. There are many dogs in the streets. But they are not the packs of ferocious beasts Twain has heard about. Instead, they are sleepy, starving, diseased little creatures to which no one...