Turkish Pictures

I

SAN STEFANO

IT is strange how San Stefano, in spite of herself, — like some light little person involuntarily caught into a tragedy, — seems fated to be historic. San Stefano is a suburb, on the flat northwestern shore of the Marmora, that tries perseveringly to be European and gay. San Stefano has straight streets. San Stefano has not very serious-looking houses standing in not very interesting-looking gardens. San Stefano has a yacht club whose members, possessing no yachts, spend most of their time dancing and playing bridge. And a company recently bought land and planted groves on the edge of Sail Stefano, with the idea of making a little Monte Carlo in the Marmora. Whether San Stefano was trying to be worldly and light-minded as long ago as 1203, when Enrico Dandolo, Doge of Venice, stopped there with the men of the Fourth Crusade, I cannot say — nor does Villehardouin. But the Russians camped there in 1878, under circumstances of great bitterness for the masters of San Stefano. In 1909, the events which preceded the fall of Abdul Hamid turned the yacht club for a moment into the parliament of the empire, and the town into an armed camp. Turned into an armed camp again at the outbreak of the Balkan War, San Stefano soon became a camp of a more dreadful kind.

I did not see San Stefano, myself, at the moment of its greatest horror. When I did go there, one cold gray autumn morning, it was rather unwillingly, feeling myself a little heroic, at all events wanting not to seem too unheroic in the eyes of the war correspondent who invited me to go. I did not know then, in my ignorance, that cholera can be caught only through the digestive tract. And my imagination was still full of the grisly stories the war correspondent had brought back from his first visit.

There was nothing too grisly to be seen, however, as we landed at the pier. Chiefly to be seen were soldiers, coated and hooded in gray as usual, who were transferring supplies of different kinds from some small ships to the backs of some smaller pack-animals. The correspondent. accordingly took out his camera. But he pretended to focus it on me, knowing the susceptibility of the Turks in the matter of photography— a susceptibility which has been aggravated by the war. Seeing that the men were interested rather than displeased at his operations, he went about posing a group of them. Unfortunately, an enterprising young police sergeant appeared at that moment. He took the trouble to explain to us at length that to photograph soldiers like that, at the pier, with hay on their clothes and their caps on one side, was forbidden. People would say, when we showed the photographs in our country, ‘Ha! That is a Turkish soldier!’ and get a wrong impression of him. The impression I got was of his size and good looks, together with a mildness amounting to languor. I don’t know whether those men had been through the two great battles or whether the pest-house air of the place depressed them. A Greek who witnessed our discomfiture came up and told us in French of a good photograph we could take, unmolested by the police, a little way out of the village, where a soldier sat dead beside the railway track, with a loaf of bread in his hands. We thanked the Greek, but thought we would not trouble him to show us his interesting subject.

As we went on into the village we found it almost deserted except by soldiers. Every resident who could do so had run away. A few Greek and Jewish peddlers hawked small wares about. A man was scattering disinfecting powder in the street, which the wind carried in clouds into our faces. Patrols strolled up and down, sentinels stood at doors, other soldiers, more broken than any I had seen yet, shuffled aimlessly past. We followed a street that led toward the railway. On the sea side of it we came out into an open space inclosed between houses and the high embankment. The grass that tried to grow in this space was strewn with disinfecting powder, lemonpeel, odds and ends of clothing, — a boot, a muddy fez, a torn girdle. They were what was left of the soldiers who strewed the ground when the correspondent was there before. There were also one or two tents. Through the open flap of the nearest one we saw a soldier lying on his face, ominously still.

We followed our road through the railway embankment. Sentries were posted on either side, but they made no objection to our passing. On the farther slope of the bank men were burning underbrush. A few days before, their fellows, sent back from the front, had been dying there of cholera. A little beyond we came to a large Turkish cholera camp. By this time all the soldiers seemed to be under cover. We passed tents that were crowded with them, some lying down, others sitting with their heads in their hands. A few roamed aimlessly in the open. The ground was in an indescribable condition. No one was trying to make the men use the latrines which had been constructed for them. I doubt if any one could have done so. Some of the soldiers, certainly, were too weak to get so far. After all they had gone through, and in the fellowship of a common misery, they were dulled to the decencies which a Mohammedan is quicker than another to observe.

Near the station some long wooden sheds were being run up for the men already in San Stefano, and for those who were to come. We made haste to get by, out of the sickening odor and the sense of a secret danger lurking in the air we breathed. We crossed the track and went back into the village, passing other soldiers. Some were crouching or lying beside the road, one against the other, to keep warm. I could never express the shrunken effect the big fellows made inside their big overcoats, with doglike eyes staring out of sallow faces. Some of them were slowly eating bread, and no doubt taking in infection with every mouthful. Vendors of lemons and lemon-drops came and went among them. Those they seemed to crave above everything. In front of the railway station were men who had apparently just arrived from Hademkeuy. They were being examined by army doctors. They submitted like children while the doctors poked into their eyes, looked at their tongues, and divided them into different categories. In a leafless beergarden opposite the station, tents were pitched, sometimes guarded by a cordon of soldiers. But only once did a sentry challenge us or otherwise offer objection to our going about.

We finally found ourselves at the west edge of the village, where a street is bordered on one side by open fields. This was where, until a few days before, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men had lain, the dying among the dead, with no one to lift a finger for them. The ground was strewn with such débris of them as we had seen under the railway embankment, but more thickly. And, at a certain distance from the road, was débris more dreadful still. At first it looked like a heap of discarded clothing, piled there to be burned — until I saw two drawn-up knees sticking out of the pile. Then I made out, here and there, a clenched hand, a gray face. A little omnibus came back from somewhere in the fields, and men began loading the bodies into it. The omnibus was so short that most of the legs stuck out of the door. Sometimes they had stiffened in the contortion of some last agony. And half the legs were bare. In their weakness the poor fellows had foregone the use of the long girdle which holds together every man of the East, and as they were pulled off the ground or hoisted into the omnibus their clothes fell from them. We did not go to see them buried. There had been so many of them that the soldiers dug trenches no deeper than they could help. The consequence was that the dogs of the village pawed into some of the graves. The dogs afterwards went mad and were shot.

There are times when a man is ashamed to be alive, and that time, for me, was one of them. What had I done that I should be strolling about the world with good clothes on my back and money in my pocket and a smug feeling inside of me of being a little heroic, and what had those poor devils done that they should be pitched, half naked, into a worn-out omnibus and shoveled into trenches for dogs to gnaw at? They had left their homes in order to save their country. They had suffered privation and neglect; starved, sick, and leaderless, they had fallen back before an enemy better fed, better drilled, better officered, fighting in a better cause. Attacked then by an enemy more insidious because invisible, they had been dumped down into San Stefano and penned there like so many cattle. Some of them were too weak to get out of the train themselves and were thrown out, many dying where they fell. Others crawled into the village in search of food and shelter. A few found tents to crowd into. The greater number lay where they could, under trees, against houses, side by side in fields, and so died. Out of some vague idea of keeping the water uncontaminated the sentries were ordered to keep the poor fellows away from the public drinkingfountains, and hundreds died simply from thirst.

The commander of an Austrian manof-war, hearing of this horrible state of affairs, went to see San Stefano for himself. He made no attempt to conceal his disgust and indignation. He told the authorities that if they wanted to save the last vestige of their country’s honor they should within twentyfour hours put an end to the things he had seen. The authorities did so by shipping several hundred sick soldiers — prodding them with bayonets when they were too weak to board the steamer — off to Touzla, on the Asiatic shore of the Marmora, where they would be safely out of sight of prying foreigners.

We were told several times, both by residents of the village and by outsiders, that they were actually prevented from doing anything to help, because, forsooth, the sick men had betrayed and disgraced their country and only deserved to die. I cannot believe that any such argument was responsibly put forward, unless by men who needed to cover up their own stupidity and criminal incompetence. Nevertheless the fact of San Stefano remains, too great and too horrible to be passed over.

How could human beings be so inhuman? Were they overwhelmed and half-maddened by their defeat? And, with their constitutional inability to cope with a crisis, — with the lack among them of any tradition of organized humanitarianism, — were they simply paralyzed by the magnitude of the emergency? I am willing to believe that the different value which the Oriental lays on human life entered into the case. In that matter I am inclined to think that our own susceptibility is exaggerated. But that does not explain why the Oriental is otherwise. Part of it is perhaps a real difference in his nervous system. Another part of it is no doubt related to that in him which makes him a mediæval man. Human life was not of much account in Europe a few hundred years ago; and in the back of the Turk’s brain there may be some proud Islamic view of battle and falling therein, descended from the same remote Asiatic conception as the Japanese theory of suicide. Certainly the Turk fears death less, and bears it more stoically, than we. Does that give him the right to think less of the life of his fellow beings?

The Austrian officer raised his voice, at least, for the soldiers in San Stefano. The first to lift a hand was a Swiss lady of the place. Her name has been pronounced so often that I shall not seem yellow-journalistic if I mention it again. Almost every resident who could possibly leave San Stefano had already done so. Fräulein Alt, however, remained. She carried the soldiers the water from which the sentries kept them. She also made soup in her own house and took it to the weakest, comforting as best she could their dying moments. It was, of course, very little that she could do, among so many. But she was the first who dared to do it. She was soon joined by another lady of the place, Frau Schneider; and presently a few Europeans from the city helped them make a beginning of relief work on a larger scale. One of the new recruits was a woman also, Miss Graham, of the Scotch mission to the Jews. The others were Mr. Robert Frew, the Scotch clergyman of Pera, Mr. Hoffman Philip, first secretary of the American embassy, and two gentlemen who had come to Constantinople for the war, the English writer, Maurice Baring, and Major Ford of our own army medical staff. The American Red Cross and English friends contributed help in other ways.

These good Samaritans left their own affairs and did what they could to make a hospital out of a Greek school into which sick soldiers had been turned. It was a heroic thing to do, for at that time no one knew that the men were chiefly afflicted by dysentery brought on by privation; and Red-Cross missions were hesitating to go. Moreover, the sanitary condition of the school was something appalling. Six hundred men were lying there, on the filthy floor, in a shed which was the rainy-day playground of the school, and in a few tents in the yard. Some of the soldiers had been dead two or three days. Many of them were dying. None of them had had any care save such as Fräulein Alt had been able to give them.

I felt not even a little heroic when I went into the yard of this school, next the field where the heap of dead men lay, and saw these voluntary exiles coming and going in their oilskins. I felt rather how rarely, in our modern world, is it given a man to come down to the primal facts of life. This reflection, I think, came to me from the smart yellow gloves which one of the Samaritans wore, and which, associating them as I could with embassies and I know not what of the gayeties of life, looked so significantly incongruous in that dreadful work. The correspondent, of course, was under orders to take photographs; but his camera looked incongruous in another way — impertinent, I might say, if I did n’t happen to like the correspondent — in the face of realities so horrible. A soldier lurched out of the school, with the gait and in the necessity characteristic of his disease. He looked about, halfdazed, and established himself at the foot of a tree, his hands clasped in front of his knees, his head sunk forward on his breast.

Other soldiers came and went in the yard, some in their worn khaki, some in their big gray coats and hoods.

One began to rummage in the circle of débris which marked the place of a recent tent. He picked up a purse, one of the knitted bags which the people of Turkey use, unwound the long string, looked inside, turned the purse inside out, and put it into his pocket. An older man came up to us. ‘My hands are cold,’ he said, ‘and I can’t feel anything with them. What shall I do?’ We also wore hats and spoke strange tongues, like the miracleworkers within: I suppose the poor fellow thought we could perform a miracle for him. As we did not, he tried to go into the street, but the sentry at the gate turned him back. Two orderlies came out of the school carrying a stretcher. A dead man lay on it, under a blanket. The wasted body raised hardly more of the blanket than that of a child.

When we went away the sick soldier was still crouching at the foot of his tree, his hands clasped in front of his knees and his head sunken on his breast.

II

OUT OF THRACE

Deep in the Golden Horn, where it curves to the north beyond the city wall, lies, in a hollow of converging valleys, the suburb of Eyoub Sultan. If you know Loti, you already know something of Eyoub, with its hill of cypresses overlooking the historic firth and the two beetling cities. The holiest mosque in Constantinople stands at the foot of this hill, among gravestones and old trees. The mosque perpetuates the memory of a friend of the Prophet, his standard-bearer, Eyoub Ansari, who took part in the Arab siege of the city in 668, and fell outside the walls. When Sultan Mohammed II made his own siege eight hundred years later, the last resting-place of the Arab hero was miraculously revealed to him, and he afterwards built there a mosque and a tomb. They have since been restored or rebuilt, but every succeeding sultan has gone there to be crowned — or rather to be girded with the sword of Osman. Until the reëstablishment of the constitution in 1908, no Christian had ever been, unless in disguise, into so much as the outer courtyard of that mosque. Even now it is not easy for a Christian to see the inside of the sacred tomb. I have never done so, at all events. But I count myself happy to have seen its outer wall of blue and green tiles, pierced in the centre by an intricate grille of brass which shines where the hands of the faithful pass over certain mystic letters. On one side is a small sebil, — a pavilion where an attendant waits to give cups of cold water to the thirsty. On the other side, another grille, of small green-bronze hexagons, opens into a patch of garden where rose-bushes grow among gravestones. And in the centre of the quadrangle, between the tomb and the mosque, stands an enormous plane tree, planted there by the conqueror five hundred years ago. Other plane trees shadow the larger outer court, where also is a central fountain of ablution, and painted gravestones in railings, and a colony of pigeons that are pampered like those of St. Mark’s.

The quarter that has grown up around this mosque is one of the most picturesque in Constantinople. No very notable houses are there, but the streets take a tone from a great number of pious institutions which line them — mosques, monasteries, theological schools, drinking-fountains, and the domed tombs of great people. The good Sultan Mehmet V has built his own tomb there, between the great mosque and the water, that he may lie to the last day in the company of so many saintly and famous men. Even the commoner houses, however, have the grave dignity that the Turks succeed in putting into everything they do. The streets also take a tone from them, — of weathered wood, — and from their latticed windows, and from their jutting upper stories, and from the many cypress trees that stand about them. And sometimes a mysterious procession of camels marches from nowhere to nowhere. You never meet them in other parts of the city.

They do not like Christians to live in Eyoub, I am told. But they are used by this time to seeing us. A good many of us go there to climb the hill, and look at the view, and feel as sentimental as we can over Ayizade. And certainly the good people of Eyoub made no objection to Lady Lowther, when she established in their midst a committee for distributing food and charcoal and clothing to the families of poor soldiers and to the refugees of the war. The hordes of Asia had not stopped pouring through the city on their way to the west before a horde from Europe began to pour the other way.

In all Thrace, from the Bulgarian border to the Chatalja lines, I do not suppose there can be a Turk left. It is partly, no doubt, because of the narrowness of the field of operations, lying as it does between two converging seas, which enabled the conquering army to drive the whole country in a battue before it. But I cannot imagine any Western people trekking with such unanimity. They would have been more firmly rooted to the soil. The Turk, however, is still half a tent-man, and he has never felt perfectly at home in Europe. So village after village harnessed its black water-buffalo, or its little gray oxen, to its carts of clumsy wheels, piled thereon its few effects, spread matting over them on bent saplings, and came into Constantinople. How many of them came I do not imagine any one knows. Thousands and tens of thousands were shipped over into Asia Minor. Other thousands remain, in the hope of going back to their burned villages. The soldiers and the sick had already occupied most of the spare room in the city. The refugees had to take what was left. I know one colony of them that lives in the fishingboats in which they fled from the coast villages of the Marmora.

So it is that Eyoub has taken on a new tone. Being myself like a Turk in that I make little of numbers and computations, I have no means of knowing how many men, women, and children, from how many villages, now swell the population of the sacred suburb. I only know that certain mosques have been entirely given up to them, that they are living in cloisters and empty houses, that their own people have taken in a goodly number, that sheds, storerooms, stables, are full of them. I even heard of four persons who had no other shelter than a water-closet. And still streets and open spaces are turned into camping-grounds, where small gray cattle are tethered to big covered carts and where people in veils and turbans shiver over camp-fires —when they have camp-fires to shiver over. But they can always fall back on cypress wood. It gives one a double pang to catch the aroma of such a fire, betraying as it does the extremity of some poor exile and the devastation at work among the trees which make so much of the color of Constantinople.

In distributing Lady Lowther’s relief we do what we can to systematize. We spend certain days in visiting, quarter by quarter, to see for ourselves the condition of the refugees and what they most need. I have done a good deal of visiting in my day, being somewhat given to seeking the society of my kind; but it has not often happened to me, in the usual course of visiting, to come so near the realities of life as when, with another member of our committee, I visited the mosque of Sal Mahmoud Pasha in Eyoub. Like its more famous neighbor, it has two courts. They are on two levels, however, joined by a flight of steps and each opening into a thoroughfare of its own. How the courts of Sal Mahmoud Pasha may look in summer I do not know. On a winter day of snow they looked very cheerless indeed, especially for the cattle stabled in their cloisters. The mosque itself was open to any who cared to go in. We did so, lifting up the heavy flap that hangs at any public Turkish doorway. We found ourselves in a narrow vestibule in which eight or ten families were living. One of them consisted of two sick children, a little boy flushed with fever, and a pale and wasted little girl, who lay on the bricks near the door without mattress or matting under them. They were not quite alone, we learned. Their mother had gone out to find them bread. The same was the case with a larger family of children who sat around a primitive brazier. The youngest was crying, and a girl of ten was telling him that their mother would soon be back with the bread.

We lifted a second flap. A wave of warm, smoky air met us, sweetened by cypress wood, but sickeningly close. Through the haze of smoke we saw that the square of the interior, surrounded on three sides by a gallery, was packed as if by a congregation. The congregation consisted chiefly of women and children, which is not the thing in Turkey, sitting on the matted floor in groups, and all about them were chests and small piles of bedding and stray cooking utensils. Each of these groups constituted a house, as they put it. As we went from one to another, asking questions and taking notes, we counted seventy-eight of them. Some four hundred people, that is,— many houses consisted of ten or more members,— were living together under the dome of Sal Mahmoud Pasha.

In the gallery, and under it, rude partitions had been made by stretching rope between the pillars, and hanging up a spare quilt or rug. In the open space of the centre there was nothing to mark off house from house save the bit of rug or matting which most of the families had had time to bring away with them, and such boundaries as could be drawn by the more solid of the family possessions, and by the row of family shoes. Under such conditions had not a few of the congregation drawn their first and their last breath.

Each house had a brazier of some sort, if only improvised out of an oilcan. That was where the blue haze came from, and the scent of cypress wood. Some had a little charcoal, and were daily near asphyxiating themselves. Others had no fire at all. On some of the braziers we noticed curious flat cakes baking, into whose composition went bran or even straw. We took them to be some Thracian dainty, until we learned that they were a substitute for bread. The city is supposed to give each refugee a loaf of bread a day, but many refugees somehow do not succeed in getting their share. A few told us they had had none for five days. It struck me, in this connection, that not in any other country I knew would the mosque carpets still have been lying folded in one corner, instead of making life a little more tolerable for that melancholy congregation.

Of complaint, however, we heard as little as possible. The four hundred sat very silently in their smoky mosque. Many of them were ill and lay on the floor under a colored quilt or a rug. Others had not only their lost homes to think of. A father told us that when Chorlu was spoiled, as he put it, his little girl of nine had found a place in the ‘fire-carriage’ that went before his, and he had not seen her since. One old man had lost the rest of his family. He had been unable to keep up with them, he said. It had taken him twenty-two days to walk from Kirk-Kilisseh. A tall ragged young woman who said that her effendi made war in Adrianople, told us she had three children. One of them she was rocking in a wooden trough. It only came out by accident that she had adopted the other two during the hegira from Thrace. I remember, also, a woman sitting beside a brasier with her two grown sons. One of them, fearfully pitted by smallpox, was blind. The other answered our questions so vaguely that the mother explained that he had no mind in his head.

Having visited, we give the head of each house a numbered ticket which enables him or her to draw on us for certain supplies. We then take in the tickets and give out the supplies on our own day at home. They say it is more blessed to give than to receive. I find, however, that it is more possible to appreciate the humorous or decorative side of Thrace on the days when we receive, in the empty shop which is our headquarters. It is astonishing how large a proportion of Thrace is god-daughter to Hadijeh or Ayesha, mothers of the Moslems, or to the Prophet’s daughter, Fatma. Many, however, remind one of Madame Chrysanthème and Madame Butterfly. On our visiting list are Mrs. Hyacinth, Mrs. Tulip, Mrs. Appletree, and Mrs. Nightingale. I am also happy enough to possess the acquaintance of Mrs. Sweetmeat, Mrs. Diamond, Mrs. Air, — though some know her as Mother Eve, — Miss May-She-Laugh, and Master He-Waited. This last appellation seemed to me so curious that I inquired into it, and learned that my young gentleman waited to be born. These are not surnames, you understand, for no Turk owns such a thing. To tell one Mistress Hyacinth from another you add the name of her man. And in his case all you can do is to tack on his father’s — you could hardly say, Christian — name.

If we find the nomenclature of Mistress Hyacinth and her family a source of perplexities, she in turn is not a little confounded by our system of tickets. We have one for bread. We have another for charcoal. We have a third which must be tied tight in a painted handkerchief and never be lost. ‘By God!’ cries Mistress Hyacinth, according to her honored idiom, ‘ I know not what these papers mean.’ And it is sometimes well-nigh impossible to explain it to her. A good part of her confusion, I suspect, must be put down to our strange accent and grammar, and to our unfamiliarity with the Thracian point of view. Still, I think the ladies of that peninsula share the general hesitation of their race to concern themselves with mathematical accuracy. Asked how many children they have, they rarely know until they have counted up on their fingers two or three times. It is evidently no habit with them to have the precise number at their fingers’ ends, as it were. So when they make an obvious mistake we do not necessarily suspect them of an attempt to overestimate. As a matter of fact, they are more likely to underestimate. Other failures of memory are more surprising, as that of a dowager in ebony who was unable to tell us her husband’s name. ‘How should I know?’ she protested. ‘He died so long ago!’

Altogether it is evident that the indirections of Mistress Hyacinth obey a compass different from our own. I remember a girl not more than sixteen or seventeen who told us she had three children. Two of them were with her: where was the third, we asked? ‘Here,’ she answered, tapping herself with a simplicity of which the Anglo-Saxons have lost the secret. Yet she was most scrupulous to keep her nose and mouth hidden from an indiscriminate world. Another woman, asked about a child we knew, replied non-committally, ‘We have sent him away.’ ‘Where?’ we demanded in alarm, for we have known of refugees giving away or even of selling their children. ‘Eh, he went,’ returned the mother gravely. ‘ Have you news of him?’ one of us pursued. ‘Yes,’ she said. And it was finally some one else who had to enlighten our obtuseness by explaining that it was to the other world the child had gone. It is a miracle that more of them do not go. One day when we inquired after a pet baby of ours his mother said he was sick: a redness had come upon him. The redness turned out to be scarlet fever. As for smallpox, no one thinks any more of it than of a cold.

With great discreetness does Mistress Hyacinth come into our presence, rarely so far forgetting herself as to lean on our table or throw her arms in gratitude about a benefactress’s neck. For in gratitude she abounds, and in such expressions of it as, ‘God give you lives,’ and ‘May you never have less.’ With a benefactor she is, I am happy to report, more reserved. Him she respectfully addresses as ‘my brother,’ ‘my child,’ ‘my little one,’ or, haply, ‘ my mother and my father.’ I am now so accustomed to occupying the maternal relation to ladies of all ages and colors, that I am inclined to feel slighted when they coldly address me as their master.

In the matter of discretion, however, Mistress Hyacinth is not always impeccable, so far at least as the concealment of her charms is concerned. Sometimes, indeed, she will scarcely be persuaded to raise her veil for a lady to recognize her; but at other times she appears not to shrink even from the masculine eye. One day a Turk, passing our shop, was attracted by the commotion at the door. He came to the door himself, looked in, and cried out, ‘Shame!’ at the disreputable spectacle of a mild male unbeliever and a doorkeeper of his own country within the same four walls as some of Lady Lowther’s fairer helpers and a motley collection of refugee women, many of them unveiled. But the latter retorted with such promptness, that the shame was rather upon him for leaving the ghiaour to supply their needs, that he was happy to let the matter drop. On this and other occasions I gathered a very distinct impression that if Mistress Hyacinth should ever take it into her head to turn suffragette, she would not wait long to gain her end.

The nails of Mistress Hyacinth, I notice, are almost always reddened with henna — and very clean. The henna sometimes extends to her fingers as well, to the palms of her hands, or even — if she happen to be advancing in years — to her hair. There is no attempt to simulate a youthful glow. The dye is plentifully applied to make a rich coral red. In other points of fashion Mistress Hyacinth is more catholic than her sisters of the West. What the ladies of Paris wear must be worn by the ladies of London, St. Petersburg, New York, or Melbourne. But no such slavishness obtains in Thrace, where every village seems to have modes of its own. I can only generalize by saying that Mistress Hyacinth seems to prefer a good baggy trouser, cut out of some figured print, with no lack of red about it. Over this she should wear in the street, a shapeless black mantle that often has a long sailor-collar, and she covers her head in various ingenious, but not very decorative, ways.

The consort of Mistress Hyacinth, as is general in the East, is outwardly and visibly the decorative member of the family. He inclines less to bagginess than she, or than his brother of Asia. He affects a certain cut of trouser which is popular all the way from the Bosphorus to the Adriatic. This trouser, preferably of a pastel blue, is bound in at the waist by a broad red sash which also serves as pocket, bank, arsenal, and anything else you please. Over it goes a short zouave jacket, with more or less embroidery, and round my lord’s head twists a picturesque figured turban with a tassel dangling in front of one ear. He is surprisingly well-featured, too, — like Mistress Hyacinth herself, for that matter, and the rolypoly small fry at their heels. On the whole, they give one the sense of furnishing excellent material for a race — if only the right artist could get hold of it.