Dancing is not uncommon in the coffee-houses of the people during Ramazan. Sometimes it is performed by the gipsy girls, dressed in vivid cotton prints and jingling with sequins, who alone of their sex are immodest enough to enter a coffee-house. Dancing boys are oftener the performers—gipsies, Greeks, or Turks—who perpetuate a custom older than the satyr dances of India or the Phrygian dances of Cybele. _Alimeh_, whence the French _almée_, and _köchek_ are the technical names of these not too respectable entertainers. Sometimes the habitués of the coffee-house indulge in the dancing themselves, if they are not pure Turks, forming a ring and keeping time to the sound of pipe and drum. Of recent years, however, all this sort of thing has grown rare. What has become rarer still is a form of amusement provided by the itinerant story-teller, the _mettagh_, who still carries on in the East the tradition of the troubadours. The stories he tells are more or less on the order of the Arabian Nights, and not very suitable for mixed companies—which for the rest are never found in coffee-shops. These men are often wonderfully clever at character monologue or dialogue. They collect their pay at a crucial moment of the action, refusing to continue until the audience has testified to the sincerity of its interest by some substantial token. [Illustration: A Kara-gyöz poster] A more elaborate form of entertainment is provided by coffee-houses fortunate enough to possess a garden or some large back room. This is the marionette theatre, and it is to be seen at no other time of the year. The Turkish marionettes, known by the name of their star performer, Kara-gyöz, are a national institution. In fact, their repertory includes almost all there is of a national theatre. In common with other Asiatic marionettes, they do not appear in person. The proscenium arch of their miniature stage is filled with a sheet of lighted paper. The tiny actors, cleverly jointed together of transparent materials, move between the light and the paper, so that their coloured shadows are all that the public sees. It is enough, however, to offer an amusement worth seeing. The theatre of Kara-gyöz would make an interesting study in itself, reflecting as it does the manners of the country. Sometimes, indeed, it has reflected them so faithfully as to require the intervention of the censor. But Kara-gyöz himself, otherwise Black-eye, is always amusing, whatever may be his lapses from propriety. This truculent individual must be a relative of Punch, although he is said to be a caricature of a veritable person, one of Saladin’s viziers. He is a humpback with a black beard and a raucous voice, to whom no enterprise is too difficult or too absurd. He is accompanied by a right-hand man who points his repartee and is alternately his dupe and his deceiver. The adventures of this amorous pair and those of the crack-voiced ladies, the brilliantly