I used to stroll through narrow streets into which the sun never enters, though in the summer months it may burn the roofs of the houses. You hear loud shouting across the road from an obscure beer-house, and fancy the place is on fire; which would be no joke in such exiguous surroundings. But it is only a few Germans with beaming faces shouting “Hoch! Hoch! Hurrah!” unable to restrain their delight over the excellent beer Herr Kusch provides for his customers and anxious to give an expression to their unbroken fidelity to the German Emperor. Further up the street, peering through a small damp window, you can see a middle-aged man sitting by a lamp writing a letter. He is a grandfather, but in Constantinople this need not clip the wings of amorous fancy. He is writing a passionate letter to an English girl. He has only seen her a couple of times in his life, and will probably never see her again, for she has gone away to Egypt. But he wants to tell her that she is a “houri”—the ideal of his dreams. It can only be in Constantinople that old men indulge in such fancies, and it is wondrous strange how they are received and reciprocated at times. In a beautifully appointed konak on the hill there dwells a haughty beauty, one of the loveliest women in the Empire. She sails into the room and tosses her empty little thoroughbred head in lofty disdain as she passes her Greek servant. But he does not lower his gaze. On the contrary, the flash of his dark eyes betrays that he has no need to do so. There is no impassable gulf here between high and low born, no helot-bred menial race marked with an abject inferiority, physical, mental, and moral, by the ruthless inbreeding of generations. Beneath an outward veneer of self-control there is a deal of the unbridled, unbroken master man of the Middle Ages left in this population. The slums of Constantinople have before now sent forth lovers for queens and wives for emperors. The Greek valet has the same pride in his veins as the more highly placed, for people in his humble station of life, men and women alike, still possess that sense of unsubdued personality the loss of which is one of the dark shadows which cloud our more “civilized” communities. There may be little education or character here in the conventional sense, and not overmuch reliability perhaps in any sense, but there is plenty of unrestrained human nature. This it is which the high-born lady pines and sighs for, and when she leaves Constantinople she will take her Greek servant with her, to while away the time for her and enliven the dreary surroundings of her aristocratic home, for she has grown to loathe the sight of her uninteresting money-grabbing husband with his sordid interests.