ania is in the Balkans.
About Roumania he was technically correct, but I think most geographers
place European Turkey in the Balkans. As things turned out, however, it
was all labor lost and time thrown away, for we landed in Constantinople
as untroubled by officials and inspectors as though we were stepping
ashore at Twenty-third Street from a Jersey City ferry.

There were no regular sailings from Salonika for Constantinople, but,
by paying a hundred dollars for a ticket which in pre-war days cost
twenty, we succeeded in obtaining passage on an Italian tramp steamer.
The _Padova_ was just such a cargo tub as one might expect to find
plying between Levantine ports. Though we occupied an officer's cabin,
for which we were charged _Mauretania_ rates, it was very far from being
as luxurious as it sounds, for I slept upon a mattress laid upon three
chairs and the mattress was soiled and inhabited. Still, it was very
diverting, after an itching night, to watch the cockroaches, which were
almost as large as mice, hurrying about their duties on the floor and
ceiling. Huddled under the forward awnings were two-score deck
passengers--Greeks, Turks, Armenians and Roumanians. Sprawled on their
straw-filled mattresses, they loafed the hot and lazy days away in
playing cards, eating the black bread, olives and garlic which they had
brought with them, smoking a peculiarly strong and villainous tobacco,
and torturing native musical instruments of various kinds. At night a
young Turk sang plaintive, quavering laments to the accompaniment of a
sort of guitar, some of the others occasionally joining in the mournful
chorus. I found my chief recreation, when it grew too dark to read, in
watching an Orthodox priest, who was one of the deck-passengers, prepare
for the night by combing and putting up his long and greasy hair.
Another of the deck-passengers was a rather prosperous-looking,
middle-aged Levantine who had been in America making his fortune, he
told me, and was now returning to his wife, who lived in a little
village on the Dardanelles, after an absence of sixteen years. She had
no idea that he was coming, he said, as he had planned to surprise her.
Perhaps he was the one to be surprised. Sixteen years is a long time for
a woman to wait for a man, even in a country as conservative as Turkey.

The officers of the _Padova_ talked a good deal about the mine-fields
that still guarded the approaches to the Dardanelles and the possibil