It is still Sunday, and you wish to post a registered letter. This can only be done at the Central Post Office during certain hours of the afternoon. You drive there, holding your letter in readiness, together with a “krone” to pay the registration fee, and wait your turn patiently. For without patience, that supposed Christian virtue (which, by the way, I subsequently acquired myself and discovered to be of Mohammedan origin), it is of little use starting on a journey to the East. At last your turn comes and you patiently watch the registering clerk, after slowly copying the address of your letter into a book, retire to the back of his capacious office. You notice that he is engaged in earnest consultation with a colleague. At last, he comes forward with an air of embarrassment and explains apologetically that he is in a “difficulty” as to providing the change out of the small coin you have handed him. Finally, he asks whether you would mind accepting a postage stamp of the value of ten heller (one penny) in part discharge of the sum due to you. All this happens within twenty-four hours! You know now that you are well on your way to the East, where a minimum value of time and an element of fiction mixed up with every action or statement of fact constitute two of the many differences between the easy-going East and the matter-of-fact West. But there are compensations in the altered aspect of life, and one is the deep impression which Constantinople produces on the stranger by its gorgeous variety of colouring, its movement, and its polyglot chaos. * * * * * Constantinople with its five hundred gardens and palaces, its six hundred and eighty mosques, minarets, and towers rising above the sea in the form of a huge amphitheatre, offers to the eye a truly fascinating panorama. Byron extolled its position as incomparable to anything he had ever seen. That great traveller and student of nature, Alexander von Humboldt, thought Salzburg, Naples, and Constantinople the three most beautiful sites in the world. Such is its mysterious charm that “a Sea of Impressions stirs the soul—as a balmy breeze plays gently upon a cornfield in bloom. An intoxicating aroma is wafted towards us. All the wonders of the Eastern World seem to float before our vision—fables and palaces of the Arabian Nights.” But if Constantinople must ever possess an attraction for the traveller by virtue of its unique situation, a deeper interest lies in its unrivalled historical associations, covering two thousand five hundred years of the world’s history. From the days of Darius, Alcibiades, and Justinian—when the corn-laden galleys from the Black Sea glided swiftly past the shore opposite Seraglio Point—down to the present time, Constantinople has always been the object of desire of ambitious rulers of nations.