Constantinople, for example, is a city with as large a population as has Berlin or Vienna, and its fire department is what you see in the illustration accompanying this chapter. They are very handsome men, as you can note for yourself, and very smart-looking, but when they go to a fire they make a bargain with the owner of the building before they attempt to save his property. The great fire-tower in this capital of the Ottoman Empire is in Galata, and from it watchmen survey the city with glasses, and at the first sight of a blazing roof one of them runs down the tower and races through the uneven streets, calling out the fact that a house is burning, and where that house may be. Each watchman he meets takes up the cry, and continues calling out that the house is burning, even though the house is three miles away, until it burns down or is built up again, or the watchman is retired for long service and pensioned. Besides these amateur firemen there are two real fire companies, but they can do little in a city of 880,000 people. The police who guard Constantinople at night are an equally primitive body of men. They carry a heavy club, about five feet long and as thick as a man's wrist, and with this they beat the stones in the streets to assure people that they are attending strictly to their work, and are not sleeping in doorways. The result of this is that no one can get to sleep, and all evil-minded persons can tell exactly where the night-watchman is, and so keep out of his way. The watchman under my window seemed to act on the idea of the gentleman who, on taking his first trip on a sleeping-car, declared that if he couldn't sleep no one else should, and acted accordingly. There is nothing, so far as I can see, in which the Oriental delights as much as he does in making a noise. It is most curious to find a whole people without nerves, who cannot talk without shouting, and who cannot shout without giving you the idea that they are in great pain, and that unless relief comes promptly they will die, and that it will be your fault. Those of them who sell bread or fruits or fish or beads, or whatever it may be, in the streets, bellow rather than shout, or cry in sharp, agonizing shrieks, high and nasal and fierce. They apparently never "move on." They always meet under your window or at the corners of a street, and there all shout at once, and no one pays the least attention to them. They might be lamp-posts or minarets, for all the notice they receive. I can imagine no fate or torture so awful as to be ill in Constantinople and to have to lie helpless and listen to the street cries, to the tin horns of the men who run ahead of the streetcars--which incidentally gives you an idea of the speed of these cars--and to the snarling and barking of the thousands of street dogs. [Illustration: A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE]