o 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, among the hurrying feet, are the famed dogs of
Constantinople; drifting noiselessly about are squads of Turkish women,
draped from chin to feet in flowing robes, and with snowy veils bound
about their heads, that disclose only the eyes and a vague, shadowy
notion of their features. Seen moving about, far away in the dim, arched
aisles of the Great Bazaar, they look as the shrouded dead must have
looked when they walked forth from their graves amid the storms and
thunders and earthquakes that burst upon Calvary that awful night of the
Crucifixion. A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to
see once--not oftener.

And then there was the goose-rancher--a fellow who drove a hundred geese
before him about the city, and tried to sell them. He had a pole ten
feet long, with a crook in the e