Well, the Constantinople of a reactionary impressionist is finished. A good deal of it vanished by magic on the night of the revolution. Of the outward and visible remainder more has disappeared already than an outsider might suppose. The dogs and the beggars went very soon, followed by the worst of the cobblestones and the bumpy old bridge that every traveller wrote a chapter about; and when I took a little journey in the world after this process was well started it struck me that the streets of Paris and New York were less clean than those of Stamboul. As for the censor and the spies, if they still exist it is in a tempered form. In the meantime the telephones, the motors, the dynamos so redoubted by Abd ül Hamid, have made their appearance. And with them has come a terrifying appetite for civic improvement. The mosaics of Justinian are about to be lighted by electricity. Boulevards have been cut through Stamboul. Old Turkish houses have been torn down by the hundred in the interests of street widening. Only a miracle saved the city walls from being sold as building material. I could wish that the edifices encumbering the sphendone of the Hippodrome might be sold as building material, in order to give back to the city its supreme ornament of a sea view. Imagine what such a wide blue vision might be, seen from the heart of the town—perhaps through a dark-green semicircle of cypresses! In the meantime the Hippodrome has been made to blossom, not quite as the rose, depriving Stamboul of its one good square and threatening to hide the beauty of Sultan Ahmed’s marble mosque. If the new gardens also do something to hide the Byzantino-Germanico-Turkish fountain which William II, in remembrance of a memorable visit, had the courage to erect in line with the obelisk of Theodosius and the twisted serpents of Platæa, they will not have been planted altogether in vain. But direr changes still have the people of Constantinople witnessed since their revolution night—fire, pestilence, earthquake, mutiny, war. They have even lived to hear, from streets of something less than sweet security, the nearing thunder of cannon, and to ask themselves if the supreme change were at hand, and Constantinople itself was to go.