But the world moves, and Turkish women move with it. The last generation has witnessed remarkable changes in their habits both in the capital and in other great cities of the Empire. For one thing, there has been a striking change in the matter of dress. The time was, when a Turkish woman brought vivid colouring into every scene she adorned. Her yashmak, enveloping head and face and neck in white gauze; her feredjé enfolding her form down to the feet in red, green, blue, pink, or any other hue she fancied; her yellow boots and yellow overshoes, worn like slippers, made her as gay and bright as a butterfly or a flower. What wonderful pictures did groups of women thus attired form, as they squatted on a red rug spread on the green grass under the shade of cypresses or plane-trees, beside the Sweet Waters of Europe and the Heavenly Waters of Asia; or as they sat in long rows by the shores of the Bosporus to drink in the salt air, to watch the blue waters and the hurrying to and fro of boats and sails and steamers; or as they floated in a caïque over the quiet sea. What a fantasia of colour they made as they went slowly past, seated in a long, narrow wagon (arabah), its high sides bright with painted flowers and gilded arabesque, under a scarlet awning edged with gold fringe, drawn by white oxen, over whose heads heavy red tassels, attached to rods fixed in the yoke, waved with every motion of the creaking wheels! [Illustration: THE YASHMAK The veil is sometimes so transparent that it scarcely conceals the features at all.]