We go time and again to all the different mosques of the neighbourhood, places renowned the world over for their architecture and which are so impregnated by the prayers Which generations of faithful believers have made within their walls five times a day for centuries and centuries, that they vibrate with spirituality and force you to meditation--not a sad meditation with visions of everlasting fires to expiate earthly sins, but encouraging meditation which whispers into your ears that God who has created such beautiful surroundings for a city like Constantinople, God who has given the power to human beings to conceive and construct such cheerful and elevating temples of worship and prayer cannot and will not create another life where the miseries of this one are continued and multiplied eternally. A meditation which makes you realize that if winter comes, spring cannot be far behind! Then again we go often to the Bazaars, not necessarily to hunt for antiques or to purchase things, but to get acquainted with the little old shopkeepers, the second-hand booksellers with white beards and turbans, sitting placidly in their small stores surrounded by books--hand-written books in Turkish, Arabic or Persian, illuminated with delicate multi-hued designs and covered with priceless old leather bindings; little old shopkeepers who receive you as a guest and as a friend, offer you tea and talk with you for hours on such and such a book, this or the other school of philosophy, this or the other Arabic, Persian or Turkish writer--without even thinking of selling you a book. In our visits to the Bazaars we carefully avoid the Jew, Armenian or Greek antique dealers hunting in the covered streets of the place for foreigners and other easy prey. After a visit or two we are known even by them and we can freely wander in the streets without being molested by their employees who try to induce strangers to visit their shops. We make friends with two or three dealers in the Bedesten, the central hall of the Bazaars, a huge circular place covered with a round dome where stands are like wide shelves and where shopkeepers sit cross-legged surrounded by genuine works of art, jewels and furniture piled in a beautiful disorder one on top of the other. We make friends with a few of these vendors--old men who have kept their stands since their early youth, people who knew my father, or an uncle or a cousin of mine, who adopt us as if we were one of them. Thereafter we have no more need of worrying; if we want to purchase something we have only to tell them and they will get it for us if it exists in Stamboul, if we see something that we want in one of the antique stores and are afraid that it is not genuine or that the storekeeper will ask us a price above its real value, we just have to speak of it to one of our friends and he will expertise it for us and purchase it for us at its real value. You see we are related to the late Reshad Bey--may the Mercy