North’s pains to please had not been wasted. The Turks whom he entertained at 30 per cent were so delighted with this wonderful Giaour that they pressed him to become really and wholly one of them by abjuring his false religion. North always parried these awkward blandishments with his usual adroitness. He never argued on religion, or indeed on any other subject, with the Turks. Nobody likes to be contradicted, and the Turks were not accustomed to bear dissent from a Giaour. Our Treasurer would not lose profitable customers for any consideration. He had not gone to Constantinople to quarrel but to climb; and he had long since learnt that at Constantinople, as elsewhere, climbing could only be performed in the same posture as crawling. So without attempting to argue, he laughed away the suggestion of apostasy by saying, “My father wore a hat and left that hat to me. I wear it because my father left it, and”--clapping his hands on his head--“I will wear it as long as I live!” He knew the Turks well enough to know that he lost nothing in their eyes by his attachment to the paternal hat. For though keen on proselytising--always by temptation and persuasion, hardly ever by constraint--they had little respect for the proselyte. By such means our Treasurer waxed not only wealthy but also wise. The Turks, as a rule, were too proud to converse familiarly with Christians, thinking (perhaps not without reason) that few Christians were worthy of their confidence. The result was that the English and other Franks who lived amongst them and dealt with them knew about as much of Turkish life, of Turkish ways of thought, of Turkish maxims of conduct, as an undesirable alien dwelling in Whitechapel knows of English life. Dudley North was the only Frank who, thanks to his natural adaptability and flexibility, had contrived to insinuate himself, more or less, into the spirit of Turkey. On those occasions of convivial expansion, while his guests sedulously swilled his liquids, North not less sedulously pumped their minds. He picked up every hint that dropped from their lips, hoarded it in his retentive memory, connected it with other hints, and, assisted by uncommonly quick powers of deduction and induction, learnt a good deal more in five minutes than the average European would in as many months. Conscious of his unique position as a first-hand authority on the Turks, he thought very little of Rycaut as an expert in the religion, manners, and politics of the Ottoman Empire. He described his work as very shallow. Once he went over the whole of it, and noted on the margin its errors. That copy, with some other curiosities he had collected and a Turkish dictionary he had compiled, was stolen from him. He could never discover the thief, but he thought that the things he had lost might perhaps be found among the belongings of the Rev. John Covel.