Commissioner’s Report appears in due course, the contents of which I have neither the knowledge nor the wish to anticipate. The settlement, for the present, at least, of the Servian and Montenegrin difficulties are further proofs, it seems to me, of the vigour and ability of the present Government. But still, giving the Turkish statesmen now in power full credit for all they have done, one cannot help feeling that this Eastern question is full of the most enormous difficulties, is, in short, about the most complicated of all the restless, importunate, ill-mannered questions that are crying out “Come, solve me,” in this troublesome old continent of ours. For it hardly needs a voyage to the East to convince any man who cares about such matters that this Turkish Empire is in a state of solution. If one did want convincing on the point, a few days here would be enough to do it. Let him spend a few hours as I did last week at the Sweet Waters of Asia on a Turkish Sunday (Friday), and he will scarcely want further proof. The Sweet Waters of Asia are those of a muddy little rivulet, which flow into the sparkling Bosphorus some four miles above Constantinople. Along the side of this stream, at its junction with the Bosphorus, is a small level plain, which has been for I know not how long the resort of the Turkish women. Here they come once a week on their Sundays, to look at the hills and the Bosphorus without the interference of blinds and jalousies, and at some other human beings besides the slaves and other inmates of their own harems. You arrive there in a caique, and find yourself at a jump plump in the middle of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. The Sultan has built a superb kiosk (summer-house) here, with a façade and balustrade of beautiful white marble, one hundred yards long, fronting the Bosphorus. (They tell me, by the way, that the whole kiosk is of the same white marble, and so it may be, but, at any rate, if it be, it is most superfluously covered with yellow stucco.) Outside the enclosure of his kiosk, at the Bosphorus end of the little plain, and some fifty yards from the shore, is a fine square marble fountain, with texts from the Koran in green and gold upon it, and steps all round. A few plane-trees give a little shade round it. On all the steps of the fountain, along the kiosk garden wall, under the plane-trees, and out on the turf of the valley, are seated Turkish women of every rank, from the Grand Vizier’s wife and family, on superbly embroidered cushions and carpets, and cloaked in the most fascinating purple and pink silks, down to poor men’s wives, in faded stuffs, on old scraps of drugget which a rag-collector would scarcely pick out of the gutter. Others of the veiled women are driving slowly round the little plain in the strangest carriages, just like Cinderella’s coach in the children’s books, or in arabas drawn by two oxen, and ornamented with silk or cotton hangings. Here the poor women