I must add a word with regard to the spelling of the Turkish names and words which occur in these pages. The great difficulty of rendering in English the sound of foreign words is that English, like Turkish, does not spell itself. For that reason, and because whatever interest this book may have will be of a general rather than of a specialised kind, I have ventured to deviate a little from the logical system of the Royal Geographical Society. I have not done so with regard to consonants, which have the same value as in English, with the exception that _g_ is always hard and _s_ is never pronounced like _z_. The gutturals _gh_ and _kh_ have been so softened by the Constantinople dialect that I generally avoid them, merely suggesting them by an _h_. _Y_, as I use it, is half a consonant, as in _yes_. As for the other vowels, they are to be pronounced in general as in the Continental languages. But many newspaper readers might be surprised to learn that the town where the Bulgarians gained their initial success during the Balkan war was not Kîrk Kiliss, and that the second syllable of the first name of the late Mahmud Shefket Pasha did not rhyme with bud. I therefore weakly pander to the Anglo-Saxon eye by tagging a final _e_ with an admonitory _h_, and I illogically fall back on the French _ou_—or that of our own word _through_. There is another vowel sound in Turkish which the general reader will probably give up in despair. This is uttered with the teeth close together and the tongue near the roof of the mouth, and is very much like the pronunciation we give to the last syllable of words ending in _tion_ or to the _n’t_ in _needn’t_. It is generally rendered in foreign languages by _i_ and sometimes in English by the _u_ of _sun_. Neither really expresses it, however, nor does any other letter in the Roman alphabet. I have therefore chosen to indicate it by _î_, chiefly because the circumflex suggests a difference. For the reader’s further guidance in pronunciation I will give him the rough-and-ready rule that all Turkish words are accented on the last syllable. But this does not invariably hold, particularly with double vowels—as in the name Hüsséïn, or the word _seráï_, palace. Our common _a_ and _i_, as in _lake_ and _like_, are really similar double vowel sounds, similarly accented on the first. The same rules of pronunciation, though not of accent, apply to the few Greek words I have had occasion to use. I have made no attempt to transliterate them. Neither have I attempted to subject well-known words or names of either language to my somewhat arbitrary rules. Stamboul I continue so to call, though to the Turks it is something more like Îstambol; and words like _bey_, _caïque_, and _sultan_ have long since been naturalised in the West. I have made an exception, however, with regard to Turkish personal names, and in mentioning the reigning Sultan or his great ancestor, the Conqueror, I have followed not the European