The town that grew up around these embassies is one of the most extraordinary towns in creation. First composed of a few Galatiotes who followed their several protectors into the wilderness, it has continued ever since to receive accretions from the various nationalities of Europe and Asia until it has become a perfect babel, faintly Italian in appearance but actually no more Italian than Turkish, no more Turkish than Greek, no more Greek than anything else you please. Half a dozen larger worlds and nobody knows how many lesser ones live there, inextricably intermingled, yet somehow remaining miraculously distinct. There is, to be sure, a considerable body of Levantines—of those, namely, who have mixed—but even they are a peculiar people. The fact gives Pera society, so far as it exists, a bewildering hydra-headedness. The court is not the centre of things in the sense that European courts are. The Palace ladies do not receive, and it is an unheard-of thing for the Sultan to go to a private house, while in other ways there are profound causes of separation between the ruling race and the non-Moslem elements of the empire. By the very constitution of the country the Armenians, the Greeks, the Hebrews, and other fractions of the population form communities apart. Even the surprisingly large European colony has historic reasons for tending to divide into so many “nations.” These have little in common with the foreign colonies of Berlin, Paris, or Rome. Not students and people of leisure but merchants and missionaries make up the better part of the family that each embassy presides over in a sense unknown in Western cities. The days are gone by when the protection of the embassies had the literal meaning that once attached to many a garden wall. But the ambassadors cling to the privileges and exemptions granted them by early treaties, and through the quarter that grew up around their gates the Sultan himself passes almost as a stranger.