But I wander too far from our village, from that larger part of it which the exigencies of space must long ago have pushed northward out of the castle close into the underlying valley. There are those who deprecate our streets, their many steps, the manner of their paving, the irresoluteness with which they proceed to their destined ends, and the desultoriness of their illumination at night. I, however, am partial to a Gothic irregularity, and I applaud the law which admonishes us not to go abroad two hours after sunset without a lantern. We do not take the admonition too seriously, but there are chances enough of breaking our necks on moonless nights to maintain a market among us for paper lanterns. These, with the candles flaring in front of sacred tombs and the casual window lamplight so pleasingly criss-crossed by lattices, make Whistler nocturnes for us that they may never know who dwell in the glare of electricity. If I find anything to deprecate it is the tendency gaining ground among us to depart from the ways of our fathers in the matter of domestic architecture. The jig-saw and the paint pot begin to exercise their fatal fascination upon us who were so long content with simple lines and the colour of weathered wood. But the pert gables of the day are still outnumbered by square old many-windowed houses with low-pitched roofs of red tiles and corbelled upper stories inherited from the Byzantines. Under the eaves you will often see a decorative text from the Koran, framed like a picture, which insures the protection of heaven better than premium or policy. No house is too small to have a garden, walled as a garden should be, and doing more for the outsider by its green suggestions of withdrawal than by any complete revelation of its charms. Few of these pleasances do not enjoy some view of the Bosphorus. I know one such, containing a Byzantine capital that makes the cedar of Lebanon above it throw as secular a shade as you please, so cunningly laid out at length on the hillside that the Bosphorus is a mere ornamental water of a lower terrace. This Grand Canal of Constantinople enters bodily into certain thrice enviable _yalîs_ on the water’s edge. Their windows overhang the sea, or are separated from it merely by a narrow causeway. And each contains its own marble basin for boats, communicating with the open by a water-gate or by a canal or tunnel through the quay.