Unfortunately I knew neither Constantinople nor its winter climate, nor its inhabitants. I had never had dealings with Turks, and had left out of my calculations the Greeks, who make up thirty-five per cent. of the population of this capital, once theirs by right of sovereignty, and still almost theirs in all that concerns the world of commerce. As a matter of fact, the sum total of my knowledge at the moment I arrived was that Constantinople consisted of three quarters or districts, Pera, Galata, and Stamboul, and possessed an hotel called the Pera Palace, the expenses at which were far too grand for my cottage style of purse. By some person of doubtful nationality, I had been advised to go to a French pension in Galata, which I was assured was cheap, clean, and comfortable. As French pensions in other parts of the world may be, and often are, all these three, the scheme seemed an excellent one; so having escaped from a weary and bored Customs official at the station, I piled my belongings upon a victoria, and we started to clatter over the knobs of stone, and through the mud-pits that are the roads of Constantinople. Through mean streets we rolled and banged our way where horse trams clanked and crawled, between rows of shops whose wares were just those of the cheap streets of any continental city, to the floating bridge over the water called the Golden Horn, a most perfect misnomer in December, suggesting the crowning sarcasm of some disappointed tourist. At the approach to this curious bridge, we were halted amid a dense crowd of foot-passengers in the everlasting fez--sprinkled with bowler hats and the headgear of every European nation--and made to pay five piastres (10d.) for the right to pass. In order to prevent any passenger evading the toll, a row of Turkish officials stood across the road, clad in a conspicuous enough uniform--a white smock. The Golden Horn was of a very ordinary mud colour, and below the bridge, prosaic enough with its crowd of steamers and the busy ferry-boats that ply up and down the Bosphorus and to the Asiatic shore. The wharfs were lined with unbeautiful Customs, port, and shipping offices, backed on the rising ground by the indescribably hideous imitation French and Viennese architecture of Galata and Pera. Tall barracks with rows and rows of filthy windows looked out upon the prospect, and at their _vis à vis_ in Stamboul across the water, and, crowning the mountain of wall and window formed by the successive tiers of houses up the hill-side, rose the Tower of Galata, a circular erection topped by a Turkish flag. [Sidenote: A Mixed Crowd]