We spent a delightful week at Constantinople as the guests of Captain--now Admiral--and Mrs. Frank Higginson. Captain Higginson’s ship was in the port and we met many of his officers, among others, Lieutenant John Jacob Hunker. These good friends arranged endless frolics and sight-seeing expeditions for us. Aside from our pleasure of being with such hospitable compatriots, Constantinople did not please me. I did not like the Turks or their capital. After the beautiful bronze and ebony people of upper and lower Egypt, the Turks looked a pale, ugly, washed-out race. I sighed for Hassan, our Bisharin guide at Assuan, with a patina of richest chocolate; for Abbas, our Theban donkey boy, whose color was like new-cast golden bronze. Hassan, who was twelve years old, was offered to us by his father as a gift, it being forbidden for a man to sell his son! At that time Constantinople was infested by bands of mongrel scavenger dogs. They were so thick in the street outside my window that they looked like a moving yellow carpet. I have been told that shortly after this these poor creatures became such a nuisance that the authorities loaded them upon scows and transported them to a barren rocky islet where there was literally nothing to support life and where the stronger devoured the weaker, the survivors finally perishing from lack of food. I have been familiar with stories of Turkish atrocities all my life, but this has always lingered in my mind as one of the foulest. It was at Constantinople that I discovered the secret of the mummy. My mother, who always had a catholic taste in curios, had bought, “unbeknownst” to me, a child mummy while we were at Luxor on the Nile. Thinking I might not like the purchase, she had concealed it from me by making each of her friends on the Nile steamer keep it for one night in their staterooms. My cousin, Julia McAllister, writes me _à propos_ of this incident: “That was a delicious story. At Cyprus she bought two bottles of a very rare wine for Uncle Sam. These were packed in the valise with the mummy. One bottle broke; this did not improve the mummy, which was not in a case, and by the time we reached Constantinople, no one would go near the valise! In Athens we persuaded her to ship the mummy home by sailing vessel.” Why did my mother want that mummy? Perhaps, like Théophile Gautier, she might have written a romance about it, had we not with youth’s cruelty ridiculed it! To my knowledge she made no use of that queer little bundle swathed in its ancient yellowed linen bands that lay for years in a trunk in our attic! She thought my sister Laura, mother of many children, might like it; but Laura refused the gift.