For those branches of learning of which Pera is so superior a mistress, an inimitable hall of learning is her much-scoffed Grande Rue—“narrow as the comprehension of its inhabitants and long as the tapeworm of their intrigues,” as the learned Von Hammer not too good-humouredly wrote. I am able to point out that it has broadened considerably since his day, though I must add that it is longer than ever! It begins under another name in Galata, in a long flight of steps from which you see a blue slice of the harbour neatly surmounted by the four minarets of St. Sophia. It mounts through a commerce of stalls and small shops, gaining in decorum as it rises in altitude, till it reaches the height which was the heart of old Pera. Here was the _Stavrothromo_ of the Perotes, where the Rue Koumbaradji—Bombardier—climbs laboriously out of Top Haneh and tumbles down from the other side of the Grande Rue into Kassîm Pasha. The Grande Rue now attains its climax of importance much farther on, between Galata Seraï and Taxim, whence, keeping ever to the crest of the hill, it passes out into the country like another Broadway between apartment-houses and vacant lots. Other Grandes Rues may be statelier, or more bizarre and sketchable. This Grande Rue must have been more sketchable in the time of Von Hammer, who found nothing picturesque in the balconies almost meeting across the street, in the semi-oriental costumes of the Perotes and the high clogs in which they clattered about the town. But even now the Grande Rue is by no means barren of possibilities—where a motor-car will turn out for an ox-cart or a sedan-chair, and where pedestrians are stopped by an Anatolian peasant carrying a piano on his back, by a flock of sheep pattering between two gaunt Albanians, or by a troop of firemen hooting half-naked through the street with a gaudy little hand-pump on their shoulders. There are any number of other types that only need the seeing eye and the revealing pencil which Pera has too long lacked. And few Grandes Rues can be full of contrasts more profound than meet you here where East and West, the modern and the mediæval, come so strangely together. [Illustration: The Little Field of the Dead]