In nothing is the natural soberness of the Turk more manifest than in his holidays. He keeps fewer of them than his Christian compatriot, and most of them he celebrates in such a way that an outsider would scarcely suspect the fact. This is partly, perhaps, a matter of temperament, and partly because Islam has not yet passed a certain stage of evolution. A holiday, that is, is still a holy day. Secular and patriotic festivals are everywhere of comparatively recent origin. In Turkey, where church and state are one to a degree now unknown in Western countries, there was no real national holiday until 1909. Then the first anniversary of the re-establishment of the constitution was celebrated on the 23d of July (July 10, old style). A highly picturesque celebration it was, too, in Constantinople at least, with its magnificent array of rugs and mediæval tents on the Hill of Liberty, its review of troops by the Sultan, its procession of the guilds of the city, and its evening illuminations. Illuminations, however, were not invented by the constitution. Long before a 23d or a 4th of July were, the splendour-loving Sultan Ahmed III discovered how unparalleled a theatre for such displays were the steep shores of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus. The accession day of the reigning sovereign made an annual occasion for great families to set their houses and gardens on fire with an infinity of little oil-lamps and, in all literalness, to keep open house. This was the one purely secular holiday of the year—unless I except the day of Hîd’r Eless. I have already pronounced the name of this mysterious divinity, who is also called Hîzîr, and whom Mohammedan legend associates with the Fountain of Life and with the change of the seasons. He is a distant relative of the prophet Elijah, of the god Apollo, and I suspect of personages still more antique. His day coincides with that of the Greek St. George, namely, April 23d, old style, or May 6th according to our mode of reckoning. I must add that he is frowned upon in orthodox circles, and feasted only in Constantinople or other localities subject to Greek influence. Nevertheless, many men who scorn the authenticity of his claims to reverence scorn not to go forth into the fields on his day, where they roast a lamb on a spit, eat _pilaf_, and otherwise rejoice over the return of the sun. And you should follow them to Kiat Haneh, if you wish to see a sight—so great and so characteristic is the press of those who celebrate the day. Perhaps they do so the more willingly because their coreligionaries the Persians keep in that way, a few weeks earlier, their own feast of _No-rouz_. _No-rouz_, New Day, is the most sensible New Year’s I know, falling as it does at the vernal equinox. The Turks also observe _No-rouz_, to the degree of sending each other pots of sweetmeat and poetical wishes that life may be as free from bitterness.