of the British, French, Italian and Turkish military police who are on duty in the streets, stabbing affrays, shootings and robberies are so common that they provoke but little comment.  Petty thievery is universal.  Hats, coats, canes, umbrellas disappear from beside one’s chair in hotels and restaurants.  The Pera Palace Hotel has notices posted in its corridors warning the guests that it is no longer safe to place their shoes outside their doors to be polished.  The streets, always wretchedly paved, have been ground to pieces by the unending procession of motor-lorries, and, as they are never by any chance repaired, the first rain transforms them into a series of hog-wallows.  The most populous districts of Pera, of Galata, and of Stamboul are now disfigured by great areas of fire-blackened ruins—­reminders of the several terrible conflagrations from which the Turkish capital has suffered in recent years.  “Should the United States decide to accept the mandate for Constantinople,” a resident remarked to me, “these burned districts would give her an opportunity to start rebuilding the city on modern sanitary lines” and, he might have added, at American expense.

The prices of necessities are fantastic and of luxuries fabulous.  The cost of everything has advanced from 200 to 1,200 per cent.  The price of a meal is no longer reckoned in piastres but in Turkish pounds, though this is not as startling as it sounds, for the Turkish lira has dropped to about a quarter of its normal value.  Quite a modest dinner for two at such places as Tokatlian’s, the Pera Palace Hotel, or the Pera Gardens, costs the equivalent of from fifteen to twenty dollars.  Everything else is in proportion.  From the “Little Club” in Pera to the Galata Bridge is about a seven minutes’ drive by carriage.  In the old days the standard tariff for the trip was twenty-five cents.  Now the cabmen refuse to turn a wheel for less than two dollars.

Speaking of money, the chief occupation of the traveler in the Balkans is exchanging the currency of one country for that of another:  lira into dinars, dinars into drachmae, drachmae into piastres, piastres into leva, leva into lei, lei into roubles (though no one ever exchanges his money for roubles if he can possibly help it), roubles into kronen, and kronen into lire again.  The idea is to leave each country with as little as possible of that country’s currency in your possession.  It is like playing that card game in which you are penalized for every heart you have left in your hand.

“But how is the Sick Man?” I hear you ask.

He is doing very nicely, thank you.  In fact, he appears to be steadily improving.  There was a time, shortly after the Armistice, when it seemed certain that he would have to submit to an operation, which he probably would not have survived, but the surgeons disagreed as to the method of operating and now it looks as though he would get well in spite of them.  He has a chill every time they hold a consultation, of course, but he will probably escape the operation altogether, though he may have to take some extremely unpleasant medicine and be kept on a diet for several years to come.  He has remarkable recuperative powers, you know, and his friends expect to see him up and about before long.