The drawings I told you of are finished, and I am now doing a set of palaces, serais, &c., but the difficulty and really the danger I have had to incur to do them you would not believe. As for insult, a Christian has always to put up with that. Perhaps the Turks, pressed as they are by the Russians, were never in a more sensitive or inflammatory condition than at present, nor the country under less discipline and order. In consequence they are more insolent to, and more suspicious of foreigners than usual. The other day I was in the upper part of a shop making some memoranda of a curious fountain while my servant waited below in a coffee-house. He assured me that no less than forty Turks came in, one after another, to ask who was that infidel, and what he might be doing there. Again, I offered some bostangis from five to ten piastres to admit me into a kiosk of the Grand Signors, now never used. The poor men trembled at the risk, but they took us, and we were obliged to steal along as they did, more as if we were going to commit a burglary than visit a deserted palace. As we were rowing to it we saw a soldier armed at all points, with his arms bare--a savage figure--rowing by the Greek and Armenian houses at the water's edge. My servant knew his occupation well. He was searching after some open door through which he could get into a house, and, if he found the master of it, he would demand a hundred or two piastres, saying he had occasion for the money as he was going to the wars. The poor man would have had to submit; to kill such a robber, even if he could, would be to incur the vengeance of all his regiment, with the risk of getting his house and half the neighbourhood burnt down. The Greek tavern-keepers dare not open their doors now, for these scoundrels swagger in and eat and drink and refuse to pay. The Turks themselves, however, are enthusiastic about the army. I saw the other day, as a colonel of one of the regiments was passing through Tophana, the people rushing forward to bless him, and kissing the hem of his garment. They like fighting and, I may add, blood, and cruelties to their fellow-men; although to animals they are remarkably humane. The number of people with slit or otherwise injured noses is a thing one cannot help remarking. The other day I saw one man who had patched his, which was still unhealed, with cotton, and he was fanning away the flies from it. When I walked up to the gate of the Seraglio to see the five tails[11] hanging up, there was the block of stone on which the heads of offenders are put, and the blood still there.