Many people have wondered how the various professions of Orientalist, ethnographer, philologist, and political writer could all be united in one and the same person, and that I applied myself to all these literary pursuits has often been made a matter of reproach. Personally, I cannot see either virtue or advantage in this odd mixture of study, but I have gone on with it for years, and I will now shortly mention the reasons which induced me thereto. I have already related how, during my first stay in Constantinople, I became a Press correspondent, and how, through constant intercourse with the political world, I entered the list of writing politicians. My interest in political affairs has never flagged; indeed, it rose and became more active when, on account of my personal experiences in Persia and Central Asia, I became, so to speak, the authority for all such information concerning them as related to the political questions of the day, and of which even initiated politicians were ignorant. The traveller who keeps his eyes open necessarily takes a practical view of all that goes on in social, political, and intellectual life, and it is perfectly impossible that the wanderer, entirely dependent upon his own resources for years together, and mixing with all classes and ranks of society, should cultivate merely theoretical pursuits. To me the various languages were not merely an object, but also a means, and when one has become practically so familiar with foreign idioms in letter and in speech that one feels almost like a native, one must always retain a lively interest in their respective lands and nations, one shares their weal and woe, and will always feel at home among them. Of course, it is quite another thing for the theoretical traveller, whose object is of a purely philological or archæological nature. To him land and people are secondary matters, and when he has procured the desired theoretical information, and left the scene of operation, he forgets it all the sooner, since he has always remained a stranger to his surroundings, and has always been treated as such. This could never be the case with me. I had so familiarised myself with Osmanli, Persian, and East Turkish that I was everywhere taken for a native. In those three languages my pen has always been busy up to an advanced age, and I believe there is hardly another European who has kept up such varied correspondence with Orientalists in distant lands.