In the morning the islands had disappeared altogether, and we were between high banks--higher than, but not so steep as the Palisades; rows of little scrubby trees ran along their fronts in lateral lines, and at their base mud forts with mud barracks and thatched roofs pointed little cannon at us from every jutting rock. We were so near that one could have hit the face of the high hills with a stone. These were the Dardanelles, the banks that nature has set between the Sea of Marmora and the Mediterranean to protect Constantinople from Mediterranean squadrons. We pass between these banks for hours, or between the high bank of Roumelia on one side and the low hilly country of Asia where Troy once stood on the other, until, at sunset, we are halted in the narrowest strait of the Dardanelles, between the Castle of Asia and the Castle of Europe, "the Lock of the Sea"--that sea of which Gibraltar is the key. That night we cross through the Sea of Marmora, and by sunrise are at Constantinople. Constantinople is such a long word, and so few of the people you know have visited it in comparison with those who have wintered at Cairo or at Rome, or who have spent a season at Vienna, or taken music-lessons in Berlin, that you approach it with a mind prepared for surprises and with the hope of the unexpected. I had expected that the heart of the Ottoman Empire would be outwardly a brilliant and flashing city of gilded domes and minarets, a cluster of colored house fronts rising from the dancing waters of the Bosporus, and with the banks lined with great white palaces among gardens of green trees. There are more gilded domes in New York city and in Boston than in Constantinople. In New York there are three, and in Boston there is the State House, which looks very fine indeed from the new bridge across the Charles when the river is blocked with gray ice, and a setting sun is throwing a light on the big yellow globe. But Constantinople is all white and gray; the palaces that line the Bosporus are of a brilliant white stucco, and the mosques like monster turtles, which give the city its chief distinction, are a dull white. In the Turkish quarter the houses are more sombre still, of a peculiar black wood, and built like the old log forts in which our great-great-grandfathers took refuge from the Indians--square buildings with an overhanging story from which those inside could fire down upon the enemy below. The jutting balcony on the Turkish houses is for the less serious purpose of allowing the harem to look down upon the passers-by. [Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE]