The steamer _King Charles_ makes the voyage from Constantza to Alexandria, calling at Constantinople, and is a very comfortable and up-to-date boat, with excellent state-rooms and a fine saloon, and ladies’ drawing-room. Officers and men are Roumanians, but as the head steward speaks French there is no difficulty. An excellent supper at midnight, with Roumanian white wine, caviare, and a glass of _slivovitza_ to follow, and then a stroll on the deck in the white moonlight. Past the Kamara and Shabaloh lights, we at last see the broad rays from the Kali Akra, and then we head straight out upon the lonely sea for the Bosphorus. One by one, the tired travellers, some of them from Ostend, Berlin, or Petersburg, make for their berths, and finding myself alone, I turn into the comfortable deck cabin kindly secured for me by telegram by my friend the Minister of Finance in Bucharest. Rising early, I was already out on deck and taking photographs as we passed the two Turkish forts, Kilia and Poiraz, at the narrow entrance to the Bosphorus. And after stopping to take up our pilot, we crept slowly up the narrow channel amid delightful scenery, some of which I photographed and have reproduced in these pages, past the pretty summer resort of Therapia and Anatoli Hissar, until we approached the capital of Turkey, with her hundred domes and minarets, looking almost like a fairy city against the blue cloudless sky as we approached. But what a disenchantment on landing! That terrible rabble at Galata in the midst of dirt and squalor, of shouting touts, scrambling porters, and scavenger dogs, is a thing to be ever remembered. Fortunately, I had a Greek dragoman, one Demosthenes Cambothecras, to meet me. I can recommend him as an excellent and honest fellow, and to the intending traveller I may say that a letter addressed to the Pera Palace Hotel will always find him. He stood on the quay amid the thousand off-scum of Constantinople, and shouted my name. I shouted back, and ten minutes later we met. When I gave him over my baggage ticket, he said— “The customs here, m’sieur, are difficult. But, with your permission, I will give the officer five francs.” I assented readily, and my luggage was passed without inquiry, while that of a bespectacled Hungarian next me was examined piece by piece, greatly to the disgust and consternation of his obese wife. I saw no money pass in the shabby, shed-like Custom House, but he told me that the chief of the Customs employed an agent out in the street to receive his bribes! So much for the morality of the Custom dues in Turkey. In that very same week the British Ambassador had made protest to the Sublime Porte regarding the same thing, but was promptly “snuffed out” by the all-influential Power, Germany.