Then, in the silence, the man who watches after night over the safety of all raises his voice in a long-drawn note of warning: “Y'a'a'an gun vaaar!” He has been notified that there is a fire and he notifies all of the danger. Most of us live in frame houses here in Stamboul and a fire is dangerous. Time and again thousands of houses have disappeared in a single night, thousands of people have remained homeless. If the fire is near we must all gather our belongings. My wife is anxious. She comes to the window: let us find out where the fire is, the watchman will tell us. He is now quite near, he beats his club almost on our doorstep. “Y'a'a'an gun Vaaar--Mahmoud Pash-ada.” It is not so bad, Mahmoud Pasha is the name of a quarter, a wholesale business district where no one lives--so the losers will be the insurance companies who charge such high premiums that they can afford to lose. It is quite far from us although from the windows at the back of our house we can see a red glow behind the mosque of Yeni Djami: it makes its cupola shine and its minarets throw fantastic shadows over the neighbouring buildings. But the conflagration is small and the wind is not strong to-night, so it will be soon under control. Let us return to the sitting-room. The watchman continues his round. His voice is now dying out in the distance. Everything is quiet again. The night has fallen. It is the hour of relaxation. We might receive the visit of some friends. One can better exchange ideas in the calm of the night, and people in Stamboul are now too poor to indulge in regular social life but they love to call on each other in after-dinner impromptu visits. They leave the more elaborate kind of entertainments to their more wealthy cousins living on the slopes of the hills above Pera, in Shishli or Nishantashe. Here we are satisfied with simple, unpretentious visits; they help pass away the time in a far more interesting and morally productive manner than the dancing and exchange of platitude usual in large social gatherings.