venerable Turk. In the evening the shop is
lighted by a torch, which blazes and smokes and gives a still more
picturesque appearance to the proprietor and his surroundings. You
stand in the street and make your purchases, looking well to your
bargains, for the old fellow, with all his dignity, will not hesitate
to cheat a "dog of a Christian" if he can. From every dark alley as
we walked along several dogs would rush out, bark violently, and after
following us a little way slink back to their own quarter again. Each
alley and street of the city has its pack of dogs, and none venture on
the domain of their neighbors. During the day they sleep, lying about
the streets so stupid that they will hardly move; in fact, horses and
donkeys step over them, and pedestrians wisely let them alone. After
dark they prowl about, and are the only scavengers of the city,
all garbage being thrown into the streets. The dogs of Pera have
experienced, I suppose, the civilizing effects of constant contact
with Europeans, as they are not at all as fierce as those of Stamboul.
They soon learn to know the residents of their own streets and
vicinity, and bark only at strangers.

Quite a pretty English garden has been laid out in Pera, commanding
a fine view of the Bosphorus. There is a coffee-house in the centre,
with tables and chairs outside, where you can sip your coffee
and enjoy the view at the same time. The Turks make coffee quite
differently from us. The berry is carefully roasted and then reduced
to powder in a mortar. A brass cup, in shape like a dice-box with a
long handle, is filled with water and brought to a boil over a brasier
of coals: the coffee is placed in a similar brass dice-box and the
boiling water poured on it. This boils up once, and is then poured
into a delicate little china cup half the size of an after-dinner
coffee-cup, and for a saucer you have what resembles a miniature
bouquet-holder of silver or gilt filigree. If you take it in true
Turkish style, you will drink your coffee without sugar, grounds and
all; but a little sugar, minus the coffee-mud at the bottom, is much
nicer. Coffee seems to be drunk everywhere and all the time by the
Turks. The cafes are frequent, where they sit curled up on the divans
dreamily smoking and sipping their fragrant coffee or hearing stories
in the flowery style of the _Arabian Nights_. At the street corners
the coffee-vender squats before his little charcoal brasier and drives
a b