In the matter of gardens the Turk has never acquired the reputation of his Moorish and Persian cousins. Perhaps it is that he belongs to a younger race and has had more conflicting traditions out of which to evolve a style. For no man likes a garden better than he. He never could put up with a thing like the city back yard or the suburban lawn of the New World. He is given to sitting much out-of-doors, he does not like to be stared at while he is doing it, and he has a great love of flowers. This is one of his most sympathetic traits, and one which was illustrated for me in an unexpected quarter during the late Balkan War when I saw soldiers in a temporary camp laying out patches of turf and pansies around their tents. The fashion of the buttonhole is not yet perfectly acclimated in Constantinople, but nothing is commoner than to observe a grave personage marching along with one rose or one pink in his hand—of which flowers the Turks are inordinately fond. Less grave personages do not scorn to wear a flower over one ear, with its stem stuck under their fez. And I always remember a fireman I once beheld who was not too busy squirting water at a burning house to stop every now and then and smell the rose he held between his teeth. I cannot claim to know very much about the gardens of Stamboul, though no one can walk there without continually noticing evidences of them—through gateways, over the tops of walls, wherever there is a patch of earth big enough for something green to take root. Any one, however, may know something about the gardens of the Bosphorus. The nature of the ground on which they are laid out, sloping sharply back from the water to an average height of four or five hundred feet and broken by valleys penetrating more gradually into the rolling table-lands of Thrace and Asia Minor, makes it possible to visit many of them without going into them. And the fact has had much to do with their character. Gardens already existed on the banks of the Bosphorus, of course, when the Turk arrived there, and he must have taken them very much as he found them. Plane-trees still grow which, without any doubt, were planted by Byzantine gardeners; and so, perhaps, were certain great stone-pines. I have also wondered if the Turks did not find, when they came, the black and white pebbles, generally arranged in un-Oriental-looking designs, that pave so many garden paths. I am more inclined to believe that these originated in the same order of things as the finer mosaic of church walls than that they were imported from Italy. Perhaps the Italians imported them from Constantinople.