tragic meetings at the coming of men broken by imprisonment or deadly climates—as once when a pale figure was carried from the ship in a chair, amid a silence that was broken only by some one sobbing on the quay. And there were those who returned to the quay every week, scanning the decks of arriving steamers for faces they never found. Altogether there was matter enough for the eye of an impressionist resentful of the demolishing of his city. Space would never suffice me to report the scenes characteristic or picturesque, the stories romantic and humorous, that could not fail to mark so great an event. The sudden outburst of literary and dramatic activity, the movement toward emancipation of the Turkish women, the honours paid by the Young Turks to the memory of the Armenians massacred in 1896, the visits of friendly deputations from Bulgaria, Greece, and Roumania, the events in the Balkans and the Austrian boycott, the manœuvres of the reactionaries, the removal of the Palace guard, the procedure of the elections, added each its note of colour. Nothing, perhaps, filled the public eye quite so obviously as the primary elections for parliament. Symbolic of what the revolution had striven to attain, this event was celebrated in each district with fitting ceremonies. One district in Stamboul solemnly brought its voting urn to the Sublime Porte on the back of a camel. Five villages on the Bosphorus, forming another district, made a water pageant that reminded one of state days in Venice. But the five great fishing caïques, with their splendid incurving beaks, their high poops gay with flags and trailing rugs, their fourteen to twenty costumed rowers, were no imitation of other days, like the Venetian _Bissone_. Most imposing of all was the procession that carried the urns of Pera through the city in decorated court carriages, attended by music, banners, soldiers, school children, and other representative bodies to the number of several thousand. Two of these were peculiarly striking. Near the head of the procession, led by an Arab on a camel, rode a detachment of men representing the different races of the empire, each in the costume of his “country.” And later came a long line of carriages in which _imams_ and Armenian priests, _imams_ and Greek priests, _imams_ and Catholic priests, _imams_ and Jewish rabbis, drove two and two in the robes of their various cults.