others the offices of carts and carters in flatter towns. They carry our furniture and fuel from the water on their backs. They chop our wood, to saw it being what they refuse. They keep guard of our houses when we go away. They patrol our streets at night, knocking the hour with their clubs on the pavement and rousing us with blood-curdling yells if so much as a hen-coop burn down at the Islands twenty miles away. They likewise act as town criers; and during the holy month of Ramazan they beat us up with drums early enough in the morning to be through breakfast by the time you can tell a black hair from a white. They are a strong, a faithful, even—if you choose to expend a little sentiment upon them—a pathetic race, living in exile without wife or child, sending money home as they earn it, going to their “countries” only at long intervals, and settling there when they are too old to work for their guild. Altogether a man might spend his days in that square and be the better for it. As a matter of fact, a surprising number of us find it possible to do so, sipping coffee, smoking cigarettes or water-pipes, and watching life slip by on the strong blue current of the Bosphorus. And as I sit there too, treated always with a charming courtliness yet somehow made to feel the vanity of thanking God that I am not as other _gyaours_ are, I often ask myself how these things may be. In other parts of the world people enjoy no such leisure unless they have rents or an indifference as to going to destruction. In Roumeli Hissar we neither go to destruction nor have rents. The case may be connected with the theory that all inhabitants of Constantinople are guests of its ruler. We are not subject to military duty, we are exempt from certain burdens of taxation, and other inducements are offered those of the true faith to settle in the City of the Sultans. I have no means of knowing how persuasive these may be, but it is astonishing how overwhelming a proportion of the less skilled labour of the place is performed by outsiders—witness the Greek shopkeepers of our village, the Albanian sweet vendors, and the _hamals_. The case at all events is not without its charm. We may not accomplish great things in the world. We may not perform memorable services for state or humanity. We may not create works that shall carry our names down the generations. But we live. We enjoy the sun, we taste each other’s society, and we are little troubled for the morrow. Could life be more? XIV REVOLUTION 1908