chre and whist once more.

We dropped anchor in the mouth of the Golden Horn at daylight in the
morning. Only three or four of us were up to see the great Ottoman
capital. The passengers do not turn out at unseasonable hours, as they
used to, to get the earliest possible glimpse of strange foreign cities.
They are well over that. If we were lying in sight of the Pyramids of
Egypt, they would not come on deck until after breakfast, now-a-days.

The Golden Horn is a narrow arm of the sea, which branches from the
Bosporus (a sort of broad river which connects the Marmora and Black
Seas,) and, curving around, divides the city in the middle. Galata and
Pera are on one side of the Bosporus, and the Golden Horn; Stamboul
(ancient Byzantium) is upon the other. On the other bank of the Bosporus
is Scutari and other suburbs of Constantinople. This great city contains
a million inhabitants, but so narrow are its streets, and so crowded
together are its houses, that it does not cover much more than half as
much ground as New York City. Seen from the anchorage or from a mile or
so up the Bosporus, it is by far the handsomest city we have seen. Its
dense array of houses swells upward from the water's edge, and spreads
over the domes of many hills; and the gardens that peep out here and
there, the great globes of the mosques, and the countless minarets that
meet the eye every where, invest the metropolis with the quaint Oriental
aspect one dreams of when he reads books of eastern travel.
Constantinople makes a noble picture.

But its attractiveness begins and ends with its picturesqueness. From
the time one starts ashore till he gets back again, he execrates it. The
boat he goes in is admirably miscalculated for the service it is built
for. It is handsomely and neatly fitted up, but no man could handle it
well in the turbulent currents that sweep down the Bosporus from the
Black Sea, and few men could row it satisfactorily even in still water.
It is a long, light canoe (caique,) large at one end and tapering to a
knife blade at the other. They make that long sharp end the bow, and you
can imagine how these boiling currents spin it about. It has two oars,
and sometimes four, and no rudder. You start to go to a given point and
you run in fifty different directions before you get there. First one
oar is backing water, and then the other; it is seldom that both are
going ahead at once. This kind of boating is calculated t