mode of attack being to invade the camels’ sensitive nostrils, which drives these patient beasts of burden to the last verge of distraction, sometimes even worrying them to death.  Stopping for dinner at the village of Sabanja, the scenes familiar in connection with a halt for refreshments in the Balkan Peninsula are enacted; though for bland and childlike assurance there is no comparison between the European Turk and his brother in Asia Minor.  More than one villager approaches me during the few minutes I am engaged in eating dinner, and blandly asks me to quit eating and let him see me ride; one of them, with a view of putting it out of my power to refuse, supplements his request with a few green apples which no European could eat without bringing on an attack of cholera morbus, but which Asiatics consume with impunity.  After dinner I request the proprietor to save me from the madding crowd long enough to round up a few notes, which he attempts to do by locking me in a room over the stable.  In less than ten minutes the door is unlocked, and in walks the headman of the village, making a most solemn and profound salaam as he enters.  He has searched out a man who fought with the English in the Crimea, according to his - the man’s-own explanation, and who knows a few words of Frank language and has brought him along to interpret.  Without the slightest hesitation he asks me to leave off writing and come down and ride, in order that he may see the performance, and — he continues, artfully — that he may judge of the comparative merits of a horse and a bicycle.

This peculiar trait of the Asiatic character is further illustrated during the afternoon in the case of a caravan leader whom I meet on an unridable stretch of road.  “Bin! bin!” says this person, as soon as his mental faculties grasp the idea that the bicycle is something to ride on.  “Mimlcin, deyil; fenna yole; duz yolo lazim " (impossible; bad road; good road necessary), I reply, airing my limited stock of Turkish.  Nothing daunted by this answer, the man blandly requests me to turn about and follow his caravan until ridable road is reached — a good mile — in order that he may be enlightened.  It is, perhaps, superfluous to add that, so far as I know, this particular individual’s ideas of ’cycling are as hazy and undefined to-day as they ever were.

The principal occupation of the Sabanjans seems to be killing time; or perhaps waiting for something to turn up.  Apple and pear-orchards are scattered about among the brush, looking utterly neglected; they are old trees mostly, and were planted by the more enterprising ancestors of the present owners, who would appear to be altogether unworthy of their sires, since they evidently do nothing in the way of trimming and pruning, but merely accept such blessings as unaided nature vouchsafes to bestow upon them.  Moss-grown gravestones are visible here and there amid the thickets; the graveyards are neither protected by fence nor shorn