The coffee-houses are, perhaps, the most characteristic feature of Stamboul streets during the nights of Ramazan. In the daytime they are closed, or the purely Turkish ones are, as there is then no scope for their activities. They are open all night long, however. And few be they that do not attempt to add in some way to their customary attractions. This is often accomplished in a simple manner with the aid of an instrument that we do not associate with the East—I mean the gramophone, which enjoys an enormous popularity in Constantinople. There, however, it has been taught to utter sounds which might prevent many from recognising an old friend. I confess that I prefer myself the living executant to his mechanical echo. One never has to go far during Ramazan to find him. Itinerant gipsies, masters of pipe and tom-tom, are then much in evidence in the humbler coffee-houses. There they go, two and two, a man and a boy, in the wide black trousers, the dark-red girdle, and the almost black fez which they affect. In larger coffee-houses there will be a whole orchestra, so called, of the fine lute, if one may so translate its Turkish title—a company of singers who also play on instruments of strange names and curves that suit the music they make. One such instrument, the _out_, is ancestor to the European lute. There are those, indeed, who find no music in the broken rhythms, the mounting minor, of a harmony which the Russian composers have only recently begun to make comprehensible to Western ears. For myself, I know too little of music to tell what relation it may bear to the antique modes. But I can listen, as long as musicians will perform, to those infinite repetitions, that insistent sounding of the minor key. It pleases me to hear in them a music come from far away—from unknown river gorges, from camp-fires glimmering on great plains. There are flashes, too, of light, of song, the playing of shepherds’ pipes, the swoop of horsemen, and sudden outcries of savagery. But the note to which it all comes back is the monotone of a primitive life, like the day-long beat of camel bells. And more than all, it is the mood of Asia, elsewhere so rarely understood, which is neither lightness nor despair.