lications; as
when a Young Turk, with a Paris veneer, has taken as second or third
wife a European woman. One wonders which of these heavily veiled
figures on the Galata Bridge, clad in hideous _ezars_, is an
Englishwoman or a Frenchwoman or a Jewess.

Night and day, year in and year out, with all kinds of chessmen, and
with an infinite variety of byplays, "the great game" is played in
Constantinople. The fortunes of the players vary, and there are
occasional--very occasional--open rumpuses; but the players and the
stakes remain the same. Nobody can read the newspaper telegrams from
Tripoli and Constantinople intelligently who has not some understanding
of the real game that is being carried on; and in which an occasional
war is only a move.

The bespectacled professor of ancient history is best qualified to
trace the beginning of this game; for there is no other frontier on the
face of the globe over which there has been so much fighting as over
that strip of water which divides Europe from Asia, called, in its four
separate parts, the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmora, the Dardanelles, and
the Aegean Sea. Centuries before men began to date their calendars
"A.D.," the city on the Bosporus was a prize for which nations
struggled. All the old-world dominions--Greek, Macedonian, Persian,
Roman--fought here; and for hundreds of years Byzantium was the capital
of the Roman and Christian world. The Crusaders and the Saracens did a
choice lot of fighting over this battle-ground; and it was here that
the doughty warrior, Paul of Tarsus, broke into Europe, as first
invader in the greatest of conquests. Along this narrow line of
beautiful blue water the East menacingly confronts the West. Turkey's
capital, as a sort of Mr.-Facing-Both-Ways, bestrides the water; for
Scutari, in Asia, is essentially a part of Greater Constantinople. That
simple geographical fact really pictures Turkey's present condition: it
is rent by the struggle of the East with the West, Asia with Europe, in
its own body.

"The great game" of to-day, rather than of any hoary and romantic
yesterday, holds the interest of the modern man. Player Number One,
even though he sits patiently in the background in seeming stolidity,
is big-boned, brawny, hairy, thirsty Russia. Russia wants water, both
here and in the far East. His whole being cries from parched depths for
the taste of the salt waters of the Mediterranean and the China Sea. At
present his ships may not pa