)
until I was weary and heartsick.

At last I determined to go without the passport, and did so; but the
delay I experienced brought me into contact with as queer a body of
adventurers as I ever encountered in my life. At the head of these
gentlemen was a Mr. Montague Edie, or Edie Montague (for he wrote the
name both ways)--a young fellow of apparently four or five and twenty,
who gave himself out, I think, as a lieutenant in the English navy, and
who professed to have authority from the Turkish Government to sail a
war-ship under letters of marque and to harry Russian commerce in the
Black Sea.

Constantinople at this time was full of hare-brained adventurers,
and Mr. Montague Edie was not long in gathering about him a band of
officers. The business of the expedition was supposed to be a profound
secret; but it was talked about with a childish _naivete_ in all manner
of public places. The chieftain laid in uniforms of his own designing,
and strolled about the Grande Rue de Pera, gaudy in a Turkish military
fez, white ducks and gloves, and a blue coat beplastered with gold lace.
One or two of his lieutenants followed his example; and the unfortunate
tailor who had provided these sartorial splendours held the Hotel
Misserie and the Hotel Byzance in siege for days in the vain hope of
extracting payment for his labours.

A droller set for the management of a ship of war was never seen
anywhere. The second lieutenant, I remember, was fresh from St. John's
College, Oxford. He had left his native shores for the first time on
this journey, and his whole experience of the sea had been acquired
in the passage of the Channel and the voyage from Marseilles to
Constantinople. Poor Schipka Campbell put him under examination one
evening at a _brasserie_ in the Grande Rue, and elicited the fact that
he supposed port and starboard to mean the same thing, and larboard
to be the antithesis of the two. I forget the first lieutenant; but a
subordinate officer was a fat City clerk who had been a volunteer in
some London corps, and who on the strength of his military experiences
had come out with intent to seek a commission in the Polish Legion.

The peculiarity of that contingent was that, so far as I know, not
a solitary Pole ever attempted to join its ranks. The City clerk
was seduced from his original purpose by die splendour of Mr.
Edie's uniform. He was himself rigged out at the expense of the same
unfortunate tailor who had supp