it is by far the handsomest city we have seen.  Its dense array of houses swells upward from the water’s edge, and spreads over the domes of many hills; and the gardens that peep out here and there, the great globes of the mosques, and the countless minarets that meet the eye every where, invest the metropolis with the quaint Oriental aspect one dreams of when he reads books of eastern travel.  Constantinople makes a noble picture.

But its attractiveness begins and ends with its picturesqueness.  From the time one starts ashore till he gets back again, he execrates it.  The boat he goes in is admirably miscalculated for the service it is built for.  It is handsomely and neatly fitted up, but no man could handle it well in the turbulent currents that sweep down the Bosporus from the Black Sea, and few men could row it satisfactorily even in still water.  It is a long, light canoe (caique,) large at one end and tapering to a knife blade at the other.  They make that long sharp end the bow, and you can imagine how these boiling currents spin it about.  It has two oars, and sometimes four, and no rudder.  You start to go to a given point and you run in fifty different directions before you get there.  First one oar is backing water, and then the other; it is seldom that both are going ahead at once.  This kind of boating is calculated to drive an impatient man mad in a week.  The boatmen are the awkwardest, the stupidest, and the most unscientific on earth, without question.

Ashore, it was—­well, it was an eternal circus.  People were thicker than bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils could conceive of.  There was no freak in dress too crazy to be indulged in; no absurdity too absurd to be tolerated; no frenzy in ragged diabolism too fantastic to be attempted.  No two men were dressed alike.  It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable costumes—­every struggling throng in every street was a dissolving view of stunning contrasts.  Some patriarchs wore awful turbans, but the grand mass of the infidel horde wore the fiery red skull-cap they call a fez.  All the remainder of the raiment they indulged in was utterly indescribable.

The shops here are mere coops, mere boxes, bath-rooms, closets—­any thing you please to call them—­on the first floor.  The Turks sit cross-legged in them, and work and trade and smoke long pipes, and smell like—­like Turks.  That covers the ground.  Crowding the narrow streets in front of them are beggars, who beg forever, yet never collect any thing; and wonderful cripples, distorted out of all semblance of humanity, almost; vagabonds driving laden asses; porters carrying dry-goods boxes as large as cottages on their backs; peddlers of grapes, hot corn, pumpkin seeds, and a hundred other things, yelling like fiends; and sleeping happily, comfortably, serenely,