On the 1st of January, 1836, we landed at the Custom House stairs at Galata, amid a perfect storm of snow and wind; nor must I omit the fact that we did so without “let or hindrance” from the officers of the establishment. The only inquiry made was, whether we had brought out any merchandize, and, our reply being in the negative, coupled with the assurance that we were merely travellers, and that our packages consisted simply of personal necessaries, we were civilly desired to pass on. I could not avoid contrasting this mode of action in the “barbarous” East, with that of “civilized” Europe, where even your very person is not sacred from the investigation of low-bred and low-minded individuals, from whose officious and frequently impertinent contact you can secure yourself only by a bribe. Perhaps the contrast struck me the more forcibly that we had embarked from Marseilles, where all which concerns either the Douane or the Bureau de Santé is _à la rigueur_—where you are obliged to pay a duty on what you take out of the city as well as what you bring into it—pay for a certificate of health to persons who do not know that you have half a dozen hours to live—and—hear this, ye travel-stricken English, who leave your country to breathe freely for a while in lands wherein ye may dwell without the extortion of taxes—pay _your own_ Consul for permission to embark! This last demand rankles more than all with a British subject, who may quit his birth-place unquestioned, and who hugs himself with the belief that nothing pitiful or paltry can be connected with the idea of an Englishman by the foreigners among whom he is about to sojourn. He has to learn his error, and the opportunity is afforded to him at Marseilles, where the natives of every other country under Heaven are free to leave the port as they list, when they have satisfied the demands of the local functionaries; while the English alone have a special claimant in their own Consul, the individual appointed by the British government to “assist” and “protect” his fellow-subjects—by whom they are only let loose upon the world at the rate of six francs and a half a head! And for this “consideration” they become the happy possessors of a “Permission to Embark” from a man whom they have probably never seen, and who has not furthered for them a single view, nor removed a single difficulty. To this it may be answered that, had they required his assistance, they might have demanded it, which must be conceded at once, but, nevertheless, the success of their demand is more than problematical—and the arrangement is perfectly on a par with that of the Greeks in the island of Syra, who, when we cast anchor in their port, claimed, among other dues, a dollar and a half for the signal-light; and, on being reminded that there had been no light at the station for several previous nights, with the additional information that we had narrowly escaped wreck in consequence, coolly replied, that