But for every day thereafter Madame Ismet Bey and her son had arranged some special entertainment for us. Quietly, unostentatiously and with the characteristic lack of show with which well-bred Turks entertain their guests, they succeeded in giving us, without our being aware that it had all been pre-arranged, a different distraction every afternoon. Friends and neighbours would drop in for tea one evening and a little dance or a little bridge game would be organized as on the spur of the moment. Another afternoon they would take us in their rowboat for an outing on the Bosphorus and we would stop either to call on some friends or to walk around or take some refreshments in the casino of the park at Beikos, which at this season is quiet and pleasant. Once we had a small picnic at the Sweet Waters of Asia. We went in the rowboat up this little stream--a miniature Bosphorus, with old tumbled-down houses by the water, big trees leaning their branches covered with autumnal golden leaves over old walls covered with vines, here and there a ramshackle wooden bridge spanning the stream and giving it the appearance of a Turkish Venice, and then large meadows on both sides, where groups of people were, like us, taking advantage of the last few days of summery sunshine of the year. Old Turkish women in black dusters, their hair covered with a white veil arranged Sphinx fashion, were sitting cross-legged near the water in silent and impassible contemplation, while younger women--their daughters or granddaughters--were sitting a few steps away on chairs, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and chattering away their time. Small boys in vividly coloured shirts, knickers hanging loose below their knees, wearing shapeless fezzes with a small blue bead--against the evil eye--would be running around and prancing with little girls clad in Kate Greenaway skirts coloured with the brightest shades of the rainbow, their loosened hair flapping over their narrow shoulders. Simple folk all, neither peasants or city folk--just the families of small village traders--the kind of people whose pictures foreign newspapermen find a malign pleasure in publishing as representative Turks. They might as well publish pictures of tenement house dwellers of New York and London as being representative Americans or Britishers. Many gypsies were there, going from group to group to tell fortunes, to sing or to dance, gypsy women of all ages and of suspicious cleanliness, who can always be detected in Constantinople by the fact that they are the only ones to wear coloured bloomers, while some old Greek and Armenian women wear black bloomers. By the way, another conception of foreigners which my wife shared but which she lost after a short stay in Constantinople was this very one of bloomers: in all our stay in Turkey she did not see a single Turkish woman wearing them.