Byzantine wall and whistled through a long seaside quarter of wooden houses more tumble-down and unpainted than I remembered wooden houses could be, and dusty little gardens, and glimpses of a wide blue water through ruinous masonry, and people as out-at-elbow and down-at-the-heel as their houses, who even at that shining hour of a summer morning found time to smoke hubble-bubbles in tipsy little coffee-houses above the Marmora or to squat motionless on their heels beside the track and watch the fire-carriage of the unbeliever roll in from the West. I have never forgotten—nor do successive experiences seem to dull the sharpness of the impression—that abysmal drop from the general European level of spruceness and solidity. Yet Stamboul, if you belong to the same race of men as I, has a way of rehabilitating herself in your eyes, perhaps even of making you adopt her point of view. Not that I shall try to gloss over her case. Stamboul is not for the race of men that must have trimness, smoothness, regularity, and modern conveniences, and the latest amusements. She has ambitions in that direction. I may live to see her attain them. I have already lived to see half of the Stamboul I once knew burn to the ground and the other half experiment in Haussmannising. But there is still enough of the old Stamboul left to leaven the new. It is very bumpy to drive over. It is ill-painted and out of repair. It is somewhat intermittently served by the scavenger. Its geography is almost past finding out, for no true map of it, in this year of grace 1914, as yet exists, and no man knows his street or number. What he knows is the fountain or the coffee-house near which he lives, and the quarter in which both are situated, named perhaps Coral, or Thick Beard, or Eats No Meat, or Sees Not Day; and it remains for you to find that quarter and that fountain. Nevertheless, if you belong to the race of men that is amused by such things, that is curious about the ways and thoughts of other men and feels under no responsibility to change them, that can see happy arrangements of light and shade, of form and colour, without having them pointed out and in very common materials, that is not repelled by things which look old and out of order, that is even attracted by things which do look so and therefore have a mellowness of tone and a richness of association—if you belong to this race of men you will like Stamboul, and the chances are that you will like it very much.