The streets and bazaars of Constantinople were absorbingly interesting. The various nationalities that everywhere met the eye; the flowing eastern costumes, the picturesque water carriers, the public letter writers patiently seated at street corners and occupied with their clients, the babel of voices, and yet an Oriental indolence pervading all, crowds but no hurry; the sonorous and musical sound of the Muezzin call to prayers from the minarets--all was new and strange; delightful too, if you except the dogs that beset the streets and over which, as they lay about, we stumbled at every step. They are now a thing of the past. Poor brutes, they deserved a better fate than the cruel method of extinction which Turkish rule administered. Of course we visited Stamboul's greatest Mosque, S. Sophia. Many other Mosques we saw, but none that approached the majesty of this. One, the Church of the Monastery of the Chora, famous for its beautiful mosaics, we did not see, although the German Emperor had driven specially to it on his visit in 1898 to the Sultan. The only good road Constantinople seemed to possess was this road to the church, which lies outside the city, and this road, we were told, was constructed for the convenience of His Imperial Majesty. One day, on the bridge that spans the Golden Horn, we passed the Grand Vizier in his carriage. It was the day on which we crossed the Bosphorus by steamer to visit Scutari on the Asiatic shore. Scutari commands a splendid view of the city, the Golden Horn, and the Bosphorus in its winding beauty, right away to the Black Sea. What a city some day will Constantinople be! The grandest perhaps on earth. In Scutari we heard the Howling Dervishes at their devotions, and the following day, in Constantinople, witnessed a _performance_ shall I call it? of the Dancing Dervishes in their whirling, circling, toe-revolving exercise. The object of both is said to be to produce the ecstatic state in which the soul enters the world of dreams and becomes one with God. There is no question as to the ecstatic, nay frenzied state many of them attained. Our last day was the eve of the Ramadan Fast. At eight o'clock that night we left by train to journey homeward overland, for time demanded that we should go back much quicker than we came. We broke our journey for two days at Buda-Pesth, and looked on the Danube; at Vienna we stayed a little longer, and found that gay city hard to leave. We drove and rode in the Prater, and horseback exercise in such a place was, I need not say, delightful. We stopped at Frankfort, enjoyed its opera and other things, then, _via_ Ostend, wended our way to London. CHAPTER XXVI. A CONGRESS AT PARIS, THE PROGRESS OF IRISH LINES, EGYPT AND THE NILE