A few doors away dwell the Albanians. You may know them by the gay stockings, red embroidered with gold, which they wear outside the tight white trousers of their country. Theirs is the dispensary of ice-cream in summer and of _mahalibi_ in winter—the latter being a kind of corn-starch pudding sprinkled with sugar and rose-water. These comestibles, of which their people have a practical monopoly, they also peddle about the streets. But it is better to partake of them in their shop, surrounded by lithographic royalties and battle scenes of 1870; and best of all in front of it, sitting comfortably in a rush-bottomed chair while the never-ending diorama of the Bosphorus rolls by. In suggestive proximity to this establishment is a Greek drug store. It might be Venetian, so impregnate is it with the sound and light of water. For situation, however, I never saw its equal in Venice. It has, indeed—especially when late sunlight warms the opposite shore—so perfect a view, the platform in front of it is so favourite a resort, the legend “La Science est Longue, mais la Vie Courte” curls with such levity about a painted Hippocrates within, that the place rather gives you the impression of an operatic drug store. The polyglot youth in charge of it stands at the door exactly as if he were waiting for the chorus on the stage outside to give him his cue; and you cannot help asking yourself whether there be anything in the porcelain jars about him. [Illustration: In the market-place] I have spoken with unbridled admiration of our market-place and its two main branches. How shall I now speak admiringly enough of the square with which they both communicate and which unites in itself the richness of their charms? It is not a square in any geometric sense. It is a broad stone quay of irregular width, tree-shaded, awning-hung, festooned with vines and fish-nets, adorned of a flat-topped fountain whose benches are a superior place of contemplation, bordered by a quaintly broken architecture of shops, cafés, and dwellings, and watched upon by a high white minaret. It is not subject to the intermittent bustle of the Company for the Promotion of Happiness, but it carries on its own more deliberate and more picturesque activities. Here commerce goes forward, both settled and itinerant, with loud and leisurely bargaining. Here the _kantarji_ exercises his function of weighing the freights unloaded by the picture-book boats at the quay. The headquarters of one of them is here, in a deep arch over the water. This is the bazaar caïque, that goes early in the morning to the Golden Horn for the transport of such freight and passengers as do not care to patronise the more expensive Company for the Promotion of Happiness—a huge row-boat with an incurving beak and a high stern, to pull whose oars the rowers drop from their feet to their backs. And here is also the headquarters of the _hamals_, most indispensable of men. These are Asiatic peasants who combine with many