If there were plenty of adventurers in Constantinople just then, there were also plenty of sterling, good fellows always ready to do one a good turn without any ulterior object. I made a delightful acquaintance, for instance, when I met Charles Austin, a Fellow of St. John's, Oxford, who had gone out to Constantinople to act as special correspondent for the _Times_. Another capital fellow was Frank Ives Scudamore, whom every one in Constantinople knew. He was the head of the British post-office there; and when I told him that I had spent twenty pounds of my own money in telegraphing to the _Standard_ from Widdin when their own correspondent went away, Scudamore paid me the money out of his own pocket, telling me that he would get it from the paper. His son was acting as the correspondent for some London paper too, and I saw a good deal of him. The names of the Englishmen whom I met in the town at that exciting time would fill many pages; but I can mention a few of them. There was Colonel Valentine Baker, for instance (Baker Pasha), who was accounted one of the finest cavalry officers in Europe, and was engaged in reorganizing the _gendarmerie_. He had picked out a lot of retired English officers for positions, and among them I met Colonel Swire, Colonel Norton, Colonel Alix, and a fire-eating, devil-may-care Irishman named Briscoe, who had been in the Guards, and who was the life and soul of the club. An exceptionally interesting old chap was General Berdan, the inventor of the Russian rifle that bore his name. I looked at the harmless, gentle old chap with considerable awe when I recollected the awful scenes in my hospital and the deadly evidences of the hard-hitting Berdan bullets. There were several fellows who had failed in examinations at Sandhurst or Woolwich, and were now hunting for glory where they fancied that a good seat on horseback would be more serviceable than trigonometry and a fair shot with the revolver would be more valuable than the most intimate acquaintance with the differential calculus. A Sir Peter Something-or-other, who was trying to sell uniforms to the Turkish Government, completes the list of my personal club acquaintances. During the few days that I was at Constantinople, Valentine Baker organized a delightful picnic to the Gulf of Ismet, where the British fleet were lying, and he invited me to join the party. We went up the Gulf of Ismet in a small steamer, and at Prinkapo we took on board an addition to our party including several ladies.