You obtain tickets for the Selamlik, as the ceremony of the Sultan's visit to his mosque is called, and you are requested, as you are supposed to be the guest of the Sultan on these occasions, not to bring opera-glasses. But it is nevertheless strongly suggestive of a theatrical performance. The mosque is on one side of a wide street; the houses in which the spectators sit, like the audience in a grand-stand, are on the other. One end of the street is blocked by a great square, and the other by the gateway of the palace from which the Sultan comes. The street is not more than a hundred yards in length. A band of music enters this square first and plays the overture to the ceremony. The musicians are mounted on horseback and followed by a double line of cavalrymen on white horses, and each carrying a lance at rest with a red pennant. There are thousands of these; they stretch out like telegraph poles on the prairie to an interminable length, their scarlet pennants flapping and rustling in the sharp east wind like a forest of autumn leaves. You begin to suspect that they are going around the square and returning again many times, as the supers do in "Ours." Then the horses turn black and the overcoats of the men change from gray to blue, and more scarlet pennants stretch like an arch of bunting along the street leading to the palace, until they have all filed into the open square and halt there stirrup to stirrup, a moving mass of four thousand restless horses and four thousand scarlet flags. And then more bands and drums and bugle-calls come from every point of the city, and regiment after regiment swarms up the hill on which the palace rests, the tune of one band of music breaking in on the tune of the next, as do those of the political processions at home, until every approach to the gate of the palace is blocked from curb to curb with armed men, and you look out and down upon the points of five thousand bayonets crushed into a space not one-fifth as large as Madison Square. There is no populace to see this spectacle, only those of the faithful who stop on their way to Mecca to catch this glimpse of the head of their religion, and a few women who have brought petitions to present to him and who are allowed within the lines of soldiers. [Illustration: STREET DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE]