conceive of,
when you entrust your person and purse to their tender mercies you
involuntarily remember with satisfaction that you insured your life
for a good round sum before leaving your native country, and that this
is one of the risks it covers.

To the European Sweet Waters you may go by carriage, but if wise will
go there also by caique; for even the corduroy roads of our Southern
country, so famous for their dislocating qualities, can be paralleled
by the so-called road over which once (and once only), for our sins,
we suffered ourselves to be shaken, not driven. It is the fashion at
Constantinople to visit the Asiatic Sweet Waters only on Friday (the
Mussulman Sabbath), and the European Sweet Waters on Sunday; and
on those days all that may be seen of Turkish ladies is on full
exhibition.

If you select the Asiatic Sweet Waters for your visit, you go down to
the wharf at Tophane, where the rival boatmen (caiquejees) raise as
loud a din and make as fierce a fight for your person and piastres as
you ever encountered on your arrival at New York in a European steamer
from rival hack-drivers or hotel "touters." Pulled, pushed and shoved
about in all directions as fiercely as ever was the body of Patroclus
in the _Iliad_, when Greek and Trojan contended for possession of it,
you are at last hustled into a caique, and deposited in the bottom
on soft cushions, your back supported by the end of the boat, your
face to the two boatmen. The caique is gayly ornamented and pretty
to look at, but it is the crankiest and tickliest of all nautical
inventions--more resembling a Canadian birch-bark canoe than any other
craft you are acquainted with. Admiring the view, you partially rise
up and lean your elbow on the side of the boat. A warning cry from
your boatmen and a sudden dip of your frail bark, which almost upsets
you head-foremost to feed the fishes of the Bosphorus, admonish you
to sit quietly, and you can scarcely venture to stir again during
the long row. The caique is long and very narrow, and sharp at both
ends--pointed, in fact. It is boarded over at these ends to prevent
shipping seas. These planks are prettily varnished, with gilded rails,
which give the boat a gay look.

The men row vigorously, and the frail skiff skims along the water at
a rate of speed equal to an express-train. But the rushing of the
rippling waters past the boat is the chief indication of the rapidity
of our progress, so smoothly do we gl