Constantinople swarms with spies. If you have ever been there, and landed from a steamer, you will recollect that a crowd of unwashed porters swarm on board directly the ship is made fast. Every man of that ragged rabble is a spy. He is only allowed on board on condition that he gives information to the Custom officers ashore as to any concealment of revolvers, books, or prohibited articles. Respectable dragomans are constantly asked to assist in this, and offered monetary reward, as well as a permit to board the ship, but they refuse—and leave the espionage to the rabble. And so it is all through the Turkish capital. Spies are everywhere—they haunt one in all the hotels, even in the much-advertised Pera Palace—and every movement of the stranger is noted. If you happen to be a German and have shown your passport in the Custom House, then you go hither and thither and do whatever you like. But if you are of any other nationality you will be suspected and haunted by all sorts and conditions of secret agents, until you kick the mud of Constantinople off your boots. I have been more than once in the Sultan’s capital, and on each occasion, on entering it, have been seized with a fit of depression, which has only been removed when I have got my passport _viséd_ by the British Consul-General, and also by the Turkish police, preliminary to leaving the place. The squalor in Galata, in Stamboul, and even in aristocratic Pera, sickens one. The streets, unswept for ages, are an inch deep in slimy mud, upon which one slides and slips at every step, and the grey, wolf-like dogs, held sacred by every Turk, prowl about in hordes, each in their own quarter, living in the streets and sleeping in doorways. Constantinople, with the most picturesque and beautiful position in all the world, is the most filthy and uncomfortable of all cities. With the exception of the Grande Rue, at Pera, there is scarcely a single decent European business street. Every thoroughfare is crowded to excess by a motley throng of Mohammedans, both European and Asiatic, and every form of costume and physiognomy, from the Tartar to the Syrian, may be seen. The pilgrimages were leaving for Mecca while I was there, and the whole city was filled with the Faithful from every part of the great Moslem world. The bridge at Galata was daily a perfect panorama of costume as the pilgrims assembled to embark. Though I spent a little time in the great Bazaar—which is always attractive to the traveller from the West—and revisited Saint Sophia and other of the big mosques, my days in Constantinople were mostly occupied in having interesting chats with the heads of the Turkish Government.