I generally leave my office at about five-thirty or six o'clock. On my way home I meet the crowd going to the bridge, the commuters who have to catch their boat as well as business people and government employees who live in Nishantashe or Shishli, on the other side of the Golden Horn. It is the rush hour of Constantinople. Every one is going home. The small stores on the avenue, mostly stationery stores and bookstores, are pulling down corrugated iron shutters over their doors. Every few minutes a grinding metallic noise indicates that another storekeeper is starting home. I buy my daily provision of cigarettes from the Persian tobacconist around the corner. I know he is a Persian, although he wears the Turkish fez, from his hennaed beard trimmed in a semi-circle and from the long frock coat he wears. Little Turkish newsboys shout the headings of the last sensational news in the evening papers. I always buy one and if I do not have the proper change the newsboy digs into his fez. They carry their change on their heads and the much worn squares of paper money are the more greasy for it. I cross the street-car tracks congested with cars wherein human cattle is packed as tightly as in a New York subway. People are streaming down the hill in groups of three or four, clerks from the Sublime Porte looking prosperous and smart despite the fact that their salary which is anyhow barely enough to support them, is paid to them every two or three months. They go hungry and live in the cheapest possible quarters but try to look well, these poor Turkish Government employees, in an endeavour to save appearances and to keep up their dignity in the eyes of the foreigners. They walk leisurely and stop to greet each other. They talk politics. I know quite a few of them and every once in a while we exchange “temenahs,” the graceful Turkish salutation. Quite a few go up the hill; Turkish business men and working girls living in Stamboul like myself. It is twilight. Overhead little puffs of pink cloud reflect the last rays of the setting sun, while one by one lights are turned on in the windows of surrounding buildings, indicating the homecoming of some toiler. The crowd in the street is thinning. I reach our house as the automobiles of the Ministers, who now meet in daily council at the Sublime Porte, pass through the gates of the Government Palace. They work late, they are the last ones to leave.