sixteen best springs, which he himself had tested. I will not enumerate all the conditions which he laid down for perfect water. One of them is that it must be “light”; another is that it should flow from south to north or from west to east. A certain spring of Chamlîja meets these requirements better than any other in Constantinople. A sultan, therefore, did not think it beneath him to house this famous water of my native town, and gourmets pay a price to put it on their tables. A second pretext do guides and guide-books, out of the capriciousness of their hearts, allow outsiders for visiting Scutari, and that is to see the great cemetery. For that matter, few people with eyes of their own and a whim to follow them could look up from the water at that wood of cypresses, curving so wide and sombre above the town, without desiring to know more of it. I have wondered if Arnold Böcklin ever saw it, for in certain lights, and from the right point of the Bosphorus, Scutari looks strangely like a greater Island of Death. In spite of its vast population of old grey stones, however, there is to me nothing so melancholy there as in our trim Western places of burial, shut away from the world and visited only with whispers. There is, of course, a gravity, the inseparable Turkish gravity, but withal a quiet colour of the human. For the Turks have a different attitude toward death from ours. I do not mean that they lack feeling, but they seem to take more literally than we their religious teaching on the subject. They have no conventional mourning, and the living and the dead seem much nearer to each other. Nor is it merely that tombs and patches of cemetery ornament the busiest street. “Visit graves,” says a tradition of the Prophet: “Of a truth they shall make you think of futurity.” And “Whoso visiteth every Friday the graves of his two parents, or one of the two, he shall be written a pious son, even though he had been disobedient to them in the world.” And people do visit graves. The cult of the _türbeh_ is a thing by itself, while every cemetery is a place of resort. The cypresses of Scutari are, therefore, the less funereal because the highways of common life run between them. I speak literally, for the main thoroughfares between Scutari and Kadi Kyöi pass through the cemetery. Under the trees the stone-cutters fashion the quaint marble of the graves. Fountains are scattered here and there for the convenience of passers-by. People sit familiarly among the stones or in the coffee-houses that do not fail to keep them company. I remember an old man who used to keep one of the coffee-houses, and how he said to me, like a Book of Proverbs: “Death in youth and poverty in age are hard, but both are of God.” He was born in Bulgaria, he told me, when it was still a part of Turkey, but he wished to die in Asia, and so he had already taken up his abode among the cypresses of Scutari. A more tragic anticipation of that last journey