At Port Said the Imperial Ottoman Bank paid me a substantial remittance one hour after I landed. In the meantime Morris had gotten into a fight with one of those dirty heathen negroes who infest the Canal zone. It was a detail, however, at least for Morris, and in two hours we were on an express train speeding for Cairo. A night at Shepherd’s and then an express train for Alexandria, where I caught by minutes a dilapidated old barge called the _Ismalia_ for Constantinople. My plan was Constantinople and then by boat to Odessa, and thence where the news was originating. The _Ismalia_ was the limit. She called everywhere there was a landing place. Her chow was vile, and the company worse, and every place we stopped the cable dispatches told of renewed disorders in Russia and the Balkans. Every hour that we lay killing time in the dirty ports at which we called I begrudged most bitterly. The Piræus and Smyrna slipped past. At Mitylene the Powers were playing a puerile game on the Sultan, or, as the papers said, “Conducting naval demonstrations against the Porte.” The wily old monarch having been there many times before, no doubt recognized in it one of those oft repeated and inefficient bluffs which so delight the heart of the European diplomats. Anyway, he stood pat, and after the Powers had had their play and saw that there was nothing doing, they pulled up their anchors and sailed away, while the Turks smiled broadly. At dawn of the fifth day from Egypt we passed the Dardanelles, crossed the Sea of Marmora, and at six in the evening dropped anchor a mile outside the Golden Horn. Constantinople at last, and the threshold of our situation! CHAPTER III _Constantinople at last!—The Threshold of the Russian Assignment—A Nation in Convulsion_