There are larger villages. There are more prosperous villages. There are villages more fashionable. Great ladies lift their eyebrows when we pronounce its name, even ladies not so great, and decide that we will hardly do for their visiting lists. But few villages are so picturesque as ours. And in one respect at least we are surpassed by no village. For we sit on that cleft promontory of the Bosphorus where, during the league-long coquetry of the two continents before their final union, Europe most closely approaches Asia. The mother of nations, as we see her some eight hundred yards away, is a slope sunburnt or green according to the time of year but always discreetly overlooked by farther heights of blue, a slope sharp enough, not too high, admirably broken by valleys and points and one perfect little bay for which I sometimes think I would give all the rest of the Bosphorus, a slope beaded irregularly along the bottom with red-roofed summer _valîs_, variegated with gardens and hamlets and nestling patches of wood, and feathered along the top with cypresses and stone-pines in quite an Italian manner. For my part, I fail to see why any one should ever have desired to leave so delectable a continent, particularly at a period when the hospitality of our village must have been more scant than it is now. But history has recorded many a migration to our side of the strait. Here Xenophon crossed with the remnant of his ten thousand. Here Darius sat upon a throne of rock and watched Persia swarm after him against the Scythians. Here, too, the great emperor Heraclius, returning to Constantinople after his triumphs in the East, caused a pontoon bridge to be railed high with woven branches in order to screen from his eyes the water he dreaded more than blood. And here Sultan Mehmed II opened the campaign which ended in the fall of the Roman Empire.