The great resource of coffee-houses, however, is the company you meet there. The company is better at certain hours than at others. Early in the day the majority of the habitués may be at work, while late in the evening they will have disappeared altogether. For Stamboul has not quite forgotten the habits of the tent. At night it is a deserted city. But just before and just after dark the coffee-houses are full of a colour which an outsider is often content to watch through lighted windows. They are the clubs of the poorer classes. Men of a street, a trade, or a province meet regularly at coffee-houses kept often by one of their own people. So much are the humbler coffee-houses frequented by a fixed clientèle that the most vagrant impressionist can realise how truly the old Turkish writers called them Schools of Knowledge. Schools of knowledge they must be, indeed, for those capable of taking part in their councils. Even for one who is not, they are full of information about the people who live in Stamboul, the variety of clothes they wear, the number of dialects they speak, the infinity of places they come from. I am at the end of my chapter and I cannot stop to descant on these things—much less on the historic guilds which still subsist in the coffee-house world. The guilds are nearly at the end of their chapter, too. Constitutions and changes more radical are turning them into something more like modern trade-unions. Their tradition is still vivid enough, though, for it to be written, as in the laws of Medes and Persians, that no man but one of Iran shall drive a house-builder’s donkey; that only a Mohammedan Albanian of the south shall lay a pavement or a southern Albanian who is a Christian and wears an orange girdle shall lay railroad ties; that none save a landlubber from the hinterland of the Black Sea may row a caïque or, they of Konia peddle _yo’ourt_, or—— [Illustration: The plane-tree of Chengel-kyöi]