Between the two plays intervene a couple of hours or so of singing and dancing that are to many the meat in the sandwich. These entertainments are also highly characteristic of the city that straddles two continents. The costume of the performers is supposably European, although no Western _almée_ would consent to be encumbered with the skirts and sleeves of her Armenian sister, or let her locks hang so ingenuously down her back. She would also be more scrupulous with regard to her colour schemes. Whatever the tint of their costume, the _ballerine_ of Stamboul cherish an ineradicable partiality for pink stockings. As feminine charm increases, to the eye of an Oriental admirer, in direct proportion to the avoirdupois of the charmer, the effect is sometimes startling. The entertainment offered by these ladies is more of the East than of the West. It is a combination of song and dance, accompanied by strings and the clapping of the castanet. The music is even more monotonous, in the literal sense of the word, than that of the fine lute. To the tyro one song sounds exactly like another, each beginning on the same high note and each _glissando_ to the same low one. And you are inclined to protest that a lady suffering from so cruel a cold should never be permitted to leave her room, much less appear in pink stockings at midnight on a ramshackle wooden stage. But there is a melancholy passion in those endless love-songs that haunts the memory—at least of most of those present, who listen in the silence of perfect appreciation. The dancing into which each song dies away has been a little more tampered with by the West. While the basis of it is the Arab _danse du ventre_, it is a _danse du ventre_ chastened by the cult of the toe. What there may be of grossness about it is pleasantly tempered for an occasional spectator by the personal equation. I remember watching, once, an _almée_ who must have been in her prime before many of her public were in their cradles. But they had grown up in her tradition, and cries of “One more!” greeted each effort of her poor old cracked voice. There was nothing pitiable about it. The audience had a frank affection for her, independent of her overripe enchantments, and she danced terrible dances for them, eyes half shut, with a grandmotherly indulgence that entirely took away from the nature of what she was doing.