If the Thursday Market goes, the rest of Galata remains, and the best of it: the alleys of jutting upper stories that know so well the value of a grape-vine, the quaint shops and coffee-houses, the cavernous bakeries, the place of broken lights where the oar makers ply the local variation of their trade, the narrow courtyard where the sailmakers sit, the wharves and landings of the Golden Horn, the quays of Top Haneh, the breakwater of Kabatash—which is at its best in a south wind—and all that enticing region called Kalafat Yeri, the Place of Pitch, where from time immemorial men have built boats and caulked them, and fitted them out with gear. In front of this shore, off the old Galata which the Genoese originally walled in, lies the noble mass of shipping of which I have already spoken. That is the supreme resource of Galata, and one which is hidden under no bushel, waiting patiently to make the fortune of the man who will etch it. Where were Mr. Murray’s eyes when he came to Galata? Her vices would hardly have attracted his attention if he had taken in the virtue of her contribution to the pictorial. VI THE CITY OF GOLD Under this designation, gentle reader or severe, you probably never would recognise the straggling settlement of wooden houses, set off by a few minarets and shut in from the southeast by a great black curtain of cypresses, that comes down to the Asiatic shore opposite the mouth of the Golden Horn. That is because you have forgotten its old Greek name, and mix it up in your mind with a certain notorious town in Albania. Moreover, your guide-book assures you that a day, or even half a day, will suffice to absorb its interest. Believe no such nonsense, however. I have reason to know what I am talking about, for I have spent ten of the best years of my life in Scutari, if not eleven, and have not yet seen all its sights. By what series of accidents a New English infant, whose fathers dwelt somewhere about the Five Towns long before Mr. Arnold Bennett or even Mr. Josiah Wedgwood thought of making them famous, came to see the light in this Ultima Thule of Asia, I hesitate to explain. I tried to do so once before an election board in that sympathetic district of New York known as Hell’s Kitchen, and was very nearly disfranchised for my pains. Only the notorious example of the mayor, who also happened to be born on the wrong side of the Atlantic and who nevertheless had reached his high office without any intermediate naturalisation, preserved to me the sacred right of the ballot. But the fact gives me the right to speak of guide-books as cavalierly as I please.