One of the sights of Scutari which always interests me is to be seen behind Shemsi Pasha, where a bluff first begins to lift itself above the sea. Here on any summer day you will notice what you may think to be lines of clothes drying in the wind. The clothes are really those soft figured handkerchiefs which are so greatly used in the East. Bare-legged men dip them in the sea to set the colours; and from them you may follow a gory trail of dye till you come to a house with thick wooden bars tilted strangely out under the eaves like gigantic clothes-horses. This is the _bassma haneh_—the printing-house. It has belonged to the same family for two hundred years, and during that time it can hardly have changed its methods of wood-block printing. Every bit of the work is done by hand. Every stitch of it is lugged down to the salt water for the colours to be made fast, and lugged back. And the factory, like other old-fashioned institutions in Constantinople, is open only from the day of Hîd’r Eless, in May, to that of Kassîm, in November. Once, as I rather intrusively poked my way about it, I came upon a man, whether old or young I could not say, who sat on the floor blocking out the first pattern on long white strips of cloth that were ultimately, as he told me, to make turbans for the people of Kürdistan. The room was almost dark, and it contained hardly anything beside the mattress where the man slept at night and a sizzling caldron beside him. The mixture in the caldron, into which he kept dipping his block, was a dye of death: so he told me, literally in those words, adding that it had already cut ten years off his life. But his employers never could afford to put some sort of a chimney over the caldron—and they assured him that employment like his was to be found in no other country. Was it true? he asked me. I thought to myself that the idyllic old days of hand labour, after which so many of us sigh, may not always have been so idyllic after all. * * * * *