as affording opportunities for pillage. As for the pumps, while there seems to be plenty of them, and the Turks pride themselves upon these wonderful machines, they are in reality absurd playthings, holding about a dozen quarts of water, which they throw out in gentle little rivulets more suitable for watering flower-beds than extinguishing fires. [Illustration: Aqueduct of Valens.] And yet the inhabitants of Constantinople might consider themselves fortunate were these the only evils existing in this connection. There is doubtless no foundation for the reports--credited, however, by some--that the government instigates many of the fires with a view to widening the streets: the dangers and inconveniences of such a method would be too great in comparison with the advantages; nor does it now happen, as it has sometimes in the past, that the “opposition” sets fire to a certain quarter in order to intimidate the sultans, or the army to enforce its demands for higher pay; but the general suspicion that many fires are started deliberately by persons who have something to gain thereby has but too often been verified, and hence the people of Constantinople live in a continual state of dread. They are afraid of the water-carriers, porters, architects, lumber- and lime-merchants, and, more than all the rest, of their servants, who are the evil geniuses of Constantinople: these people are all in league with organized bands of thieves, they in turn being in communication with various other secret organizations which manage the sale of every kind of stolen property and facilitate the commission of all manner of crimes, while the local police treat them all alike with a leniency which savors strongly of complicity. No incendiary was ever known to be punished, and thieves are rarely arraigned after a fire; more rarely still are the stolen goods restored to their rightful owners. Moreover, Constantinople being a rendezvous for miscreants from all over the world, the course of justice is constantly being blocked by international complications: consuls demand the surrender of criminals of their own countries; trials drag on for centuries; and so many delinquents escape altogether that the fear of punishment as a restraining influence upon the criminal class is almost _nil_, and they have come to look upon the plundering of houses during a fire much in the light of a privilege tacitly acknowledged by the authorities to be theirs, just as soldiers were formerly allowed to sack and plunder a vanquished city. And so the word “Fire” still means for the inhabitants of Constantinople “every misfortune,” and the cry _Yanghen Vahr_ is charged with a dread meaning, terrible, fateful, carrying with it dismay--a cry at which the entire city is moved to its very depths, and pours forth as at the announcement of a scourge from God. And who can tell how often yet the great metropolis is doomed to fall before the