It is not the fashion to speak well of Pera and Galata. A good Turk will sigh of another that he has gone to Pera, by way of saying that he has gone to the dogs. A foreign resident will scarcely admit that so much as the view is good. Even a Perote born pretends not to love his Grande Rue if he happens to have read Loti or Claude Farrère. And tourists are supposed to have done the left bank of the Golden Horn when they have watched the Sultan drive to mosque and have giggled at the whirling dervishes. A few of the more thorough-going will, perhaps, take the trouble to climb Galata Tower or to row up the Sweet Waters of Europe. For my part, however, who belong to none of these categories, I am perverse enough to find Pera and Galata a highly superior place of habitation. I consider that their greatest fault is to lie under the shadow of Stamboul—though that gives them one inestimable advantage which Stamboul herself lacks, namely the view of the dark old city crowned by her imperial mosques. Pera—and I now mean the whole promontory between the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus—Pera occupies a really magnificent site, it has a history of its own, it contains monuments that would make the fortune of any other town, and it fairly drips with that modern pigment known as local colour. Who knows, it may even be destined to inherit the renown of the older city. Stamboul tends to diminish, whereas Pera grows and has unlimited room for growing. The left bank is already the seat of the Sultan and of the bulk of the commerce and finance of the capital. Moreover, the battles of the revolution fought there in 1909 give the place a peculiar interest in the eyes of the Young Turks. On that soil, less encumbered than Stamboul with the débris of history, they may find conditions more favourable for the city of their future.