of those who profess it than Protestant Christianity. However, I did not set out to compare religions. All I wish is to point out the importance of mosques and their precincts in the picture of Constantinople. The yards of the imperial mosques take the place, in Stamboul, of squares and parks. Even many a smaller mosque enjoys an amplitude of perspective that might be envied by cathedrals like Chartres, or Cologne, or Milan. These roomy enclosures are surrounded by the windowed walls which I have already celebrated. Within them cypresses are wont to cluster, and plane-trees willingly cast their giant shadow. Gravestones also congregate there. And there a centre of life is which can never lack interest for the race of men that likes Stamboul. Scribes sit under the trees ready to write letters for soldiers, women, and others of the less literate sort. Seal cutters ply their cognate trade, and cut your name on a bit of brass almost as quickly as you can write it. Barbers, distinguishable by a brass plate with a nick in it for your chin, are ready to exercise another art upon your person. Pedlers come and go, selling beads, perfumes, fezzes, and sweets which they carry on their heads in big wooden trays, and drinks which may tempt you less than their brass receptacles. A more stable commerce is visible in some mosque yards, or on the day of the week when a peripatetic market elects to pitch its tents there; and coffee-houses, of course, abound. Not that there are coffee-houses in every mosque yard. I know one small mosque yard, that of Mahmoud Pasha—off the busy street of that name leading to the Bazaars—which is entirely given up to coffee-houses. And a perfect mosque yard it is, grove-like with trees and looked upon by a great portico of the time of the Conqueror. There is something both grave and human about mosque yards and coffee-houses both that excellently suits them to each other. The combination is one that I, at any rate, am incapable of resisting. I dare not guess how many days of my life I have I cannot say wasted in the coffee-houses of Mahmoud Pasha, and Yeni Jami, and Baïezid, and Shah-zadeh, and Fatih. The company has an ecclesiastical tinge. Turbans bob much together and the neighbouring fountains of ablution play a part in the scene. And if the company does not disperse altogether it thins very much when the voice of the _müezin_, the chanter, sounds from his high white tower. “God is most great!” he chants to the four quarters of the earth. “I bear witness that there is not a god save God! I bear witness that Mohammed is the Prophet of God! Hasten to the worship of God! Hasten to permanent blessedness! God is most great!” [Illustration: The yard of Hekim-zadeh Ali Pasha]