To many people the colour of Stamboul looks purely Turkish—at first sight. The simplest peasant of Asia Minor could not look at it often, however, without noticing things of an order strange to him—a sculptured capital lying in the street, bits of flowered marble set into a wall, a column as high as a minaret standing by itself, a dome of unfamiliar shape, and mosque walls mysterious with unreadable letters and the sacrilegious picturing of human forms, and ruined masonry or dark subterranean vaultings leading off into myth. For other newcomers it may become a game of the most engrossing kind to track out these old things, and mark how Stamboul has fitted into the ruts of Byzantium, and hunt for some lost piece of antiquity that no one else has found. And there are men for whom Stamboul does not exist. Through it they walk as in some inner city of the mind, seeing only the vanished capital of the Cæsars. Divan Yolou is for them the _Mese_ of old. In the Hippodrome they still hear the thunder of Roman chariots. And many a Turkish monument has interest for them only because its marbles are anagrams that spell anew the glory of the ancient world. Need I say that I am no such man? The essential colour of Constantinople is for me, who am neither Byzantinist nor Orientalist, a composite one, and the richer for being so. I confess I do not like the minarets of St. Sophia, but it is only because they are ugly. I am sorry that the palace of Constantine has so completely disappeared, but I am Philistine enough to suspect that the mosque built on its site may lift quite as imposing a mass against the sky. I like to remember that the most important street of Stamboul was the Triumphal Way of the Byzantine emperors—and earlier still the home-stretch of a famous Roman road, the _Via Egnatia_, which continued from Dyrrhachium on the Adriatic, the Durazzo of Balkan squabbles, the line of the Appian Way; but it seems to me that the sultans added interest to that historic thoroughfare. Nevertheless, I am inconsistent enough to be sorry that Byzantinists are so rare, and to be a little jealous of _the glory that was Greece,_ _And the grandeur that was Rome._