The very darkness of the background, the dirty narrow street, the timber houses, the time-stained wooden minaret, acted as a foil to the Oriental brilliance of the dress and merchandise, the scarlet sashes, the gold embroidery, those gorgeous little maidens—doomed most of them by sweet thirteen to take the winding-sheets of Turkish matrimony, and bury their beauty in harems, where by thirty-five they are turned old hags; but now, poor little butterflies! fluttering out their brief child-glimpse of the world—light-smocked, in linen chemises, chevroned with rainbow threads of colour—bagged as to their legs, but beflowered with roses of Shiraz—pranked out with gilt coin-bespangled fezzes, whence fountain-like the separate jets of their tresses trickle forth in a score of silken plaits; Perilets, with sisterly arms round each other’s necks, deigning to smile on the strange Giaours. There, too, are their little brothers, showing more of their slender legs, but gay as their sisters, in bags and tunics, with pates not yet artificially baldened, but long-haired as the little maidens, only in softer cascades, falling down their backs, and fringing their foreheads. Capillati (_Copi_ is still the word for boys among the Roumans of East Europe)—one almost hoped to see a bulla round their necks! and indeed I doubt not that they wore many a potent spell against the Evil Eye. There was one little lad of about five, with blue eyes and hair of Scandinavian lightness, the cut of which called up some tiny page of Charles the Second’s days, who, with some of his playmates, crowded so near as to shut out the view of the two mysterious Franks from the grave and reverend signiors behind, whereupon a Turk, who happened to hold a small switch in his hand, came forward and flicked these small flies away. The whip just touched our small urchin, who moved out of the way with the others. He did not cry, but more, as it seemed, in sorrow than in anger, fixed on his flagellator a look of such childish dignity and grave surprise as should have annihilated anyone less impassive than a Turk. It said, as plainly as a look can speak, ‘I am not accustomed to such treatment.’ The look of a child may seem a slight matter, but it was eloquent of the tenderness with which the Turks treat children—a tenderness which does them honour. Such an unkind cut was a new experience in the little lad’s life.