We often went up to the Turkish quarter, but never learned the road to the gate. But with a few words of Turkish, which one must naturally pick up, and many signs, we could generally manage to get coffee and directions. We always halted at the gates, and, supplied with stools by the _café-ji_ there, sat and rested for half an hour, watching the children come to the fountain with jugs for water, the women slip noiselessly by, covering their faces with special care at spying us, and the men pass through the eye of the needle hunched up on under-sized asses. Truly a Biblical scene, though the characters were Mohamedans. There is a great dignity about the ruling race, the man for whom all others step aside, who drinks first at the fountain and removes his fez nowhere. He is not loud or voluble, and seldom loses his temper. When he is provoked he does not squabble, but strikes. The Christian natives of Salonica are generous in warning one of dangers outside the walls, of brigands and revolutionists; but we often strolled through the gates and over to the barren hills beyond, encountering Turks, Albanians, and Bulgarians, perhaps insurgents, without mishap. The hills were especially attractive in the afternoon, cooler than the closed-in bay below, and pervaded with a quiet in delightful relief from the ceaseless babble of swarming Levantine tradesmen down in the town. At sunset hour we found a favourite spot on the edge of a steep declivity with only a broad expanse of plain between us and the purple mountains of Thessaly. The sun dropped into a dip in these and left the sky for an hour rich in Oriental colouring flaming from behind. To the south a stern bit of the old wall on the precipitous corner of a rock was silhouetted, and we could never tell whether we preferred this in or out of the picture. That is a true test of quality, when either of two things is preferred as it happens to be at hand; generally the unpossessed is the desired. Tourists do not come to Macedonia, but if they did they would find a show that no other part of Europe can produce. Not only is the comic-opera stage outdone in characters, in costumes, and in complexity of plot, but the scene is set in alpine mountains on a vaster scale than Switzerland affords. But to pass all these--for the play comes in in the course of the book, and scenery baffles description--there are relics of the ages that would interest many a man who has already travelled far. Salonica is said to be richer than any city in Greece in ecclesiastical remains, and its ancient structures, for the most part, have borne well the ravages of time. There are many great edifices, built by the Romans during their occupation and by the Greeks in their time, and a minaret at the corner of each denotes the purpose it serves to-day.