Until a few years ago Constantinople possessed no other water-system. Now modern water companies operate in their more invisible ways. But the Ministry of Pious Foundations is still the greatest water company of them all. That it was a fairly adequate one our American traveller of a hundred years ago is witness. Only recently, however, has the department attempted to make some sort of order out of the chaos of systems which it administers—some larger, like the water-supplies of the Sultans, some limited to the capacity of one small spring, and all based on the idea of a charity rather than that of a self-paying utility. Even now I doubt if any exact and complete map exists of the water-supply of Constantinople. The knowledge necessary to make such a map is distributed between an infinity of individuals known as _souyoljîs_, waterway men, who alone can tell, often, just where the pipes lie and how they are fed. And very useful, if occasionally very trying, gentlemen are these to know. This is sometimes amusingly illustrated on the outskirts of the city, where a house or a group of houses may be supplied from some small independent source of water. As time has passed and property has changed hands, the tradition of the waterway has been preserved only in some humble family that has profited by its knowledge, perhaps, to cultivate a tidy vegetable garden. And every now and then the water runs low or stops altogether in the quarter for whose benefit it was originally made to flow, until on payment of a tip to the _souyoljî_ it miraculously begins to flow again.