There are few cities in the world where nightfall makes such a difference as in Stamboul. By day the surroundings of the city as well as the city itself make up a kind of earthly paradise. I climbed the tower of the Seraskierat, and gazed with astonishment at the panorama which lay before me. I saw two seas, the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmora; two straits, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles; two gulfs, the Gulf of Ismet and the Gulf of Nicodema. At my feet lay twenty different cities, the houses of which, painted with the true Oriental love of bright colours, nestled against a background of hills clothed with patches of dark cypress and tall, spiry pines. Before me was the spot where two continents meet; and as my eye passed from the streets of Stamboul in Europe to Scutari lying yonder across the mouth of the Bosphorus in Asia, I realized how the tide of Eastern thought had swept across the waters of this narrow strait, and left its mark indelibly upon the strange people among whom I had come to take the chances of the battle-field. I knew too that across there in Scutari was the burial-ground where the bones of those English officers and men who died in hospital after the Crimea lay buried, and I felt that with the brave dead of my own race so near me I was in good company. The old military hospital at Scutari has been turned into barracks now; but the room which Miss Florence Nightingale occupied while she was performing her mission of mercy to the wounded there is still preserved untouched, while her name is kept in affectionate remembrance by the sons of many whom she nursed back to life, or whose last hours she soothed with womanly ministering. As I looked out upon the landscape, I saw it set in the clear atmosphere of Southern Europe, so that every separate minaret stood sharply out and the marble domes of St. Sophia glistened in the bright sunlight. All is warmth and colour, life and brightness, in Stamboul by day. By night, however, the difference is appalling. The streets were never lighted, and people were not supposed to be out after nine o'clock. If one went out at all, one went at one's own risk, and took the chance of attack by any of the thousands of stray dogs that prowl at will about the city and camp undisturbed in the streets. To one who had been accustomed to Paris and Vienna, where it is never night in this sense, where gas and arc lamps form an admirable substitute for sunlight, and where the patter of feet on the _trottoirs_ and the hum of human life in the cafés are practically ceaseless, the sensation of wandering through these dark, deserted streets among hordes of starving curs was a strange one. By day Constantinople is modern, pulsating, alive. By night, with those dogs about, it is like one of those deserted cities of a long forgotten civilization, in which Briton Rivière shows us the panther and the tiger that have taken the place of man.