rs, I think, depends our destiny. But, gentlemen, you would rather
hear my adventures, perhaps, than my reflections; and I am truly
concerned, for your sakes, that I have no wonderful events to relate. I
am sorry I cannot tell you of my having been lost in a sandy desert. I
have never had the plague, nor even been shipwrecked: I have been all my
life an inhabitant of Constantinople, and have passed my time in a very
quiet and uniform manner.

"The money I received from the sultan's favourite for my china vase, as
my brother may have told you, enabled me to trade on a more extensive
scale. I went on steadily with my business, and made it my whole study
to please my employers by all fair and honourable means. This industry
and civility succeeded beyond my expectations: in a few years I was rich
for a man in my way of business.

"I will not proceed to trouble you with the journal of a petty merchant's
life; I pass on to the incident which made a considerable change in my
affairs.

"A terrible fire broke out near the walls of the grand seignior's
seraglio. As you are strangers, gentlemen, you may not have heard of
this event, though it produced so great a sensation in Constantinople.
The vizier's superb palace was utterly consumed, and the melted lead
poured down from the roof of the mosque of St. Sophia. Various were the
opinions formed by my neighbours respecting the cause of the
conflagration. Some supposed it to be a punishment for the sultan's
having neglected one Friday to appear it the mosque of St. Sophia; others
considered it as a warning sent by Mahomet to dissuade the Porte from
persisting in a war in which we were just engaged. The generality,
however, of the coffee-house politicians contented themselves with
observing that it was the will of Mahomet that the palace should be
consumed. Satisfied by this supposition, they took no precaution to
prevent similar accidents in their own houses. Never were fires so
common in the city as at this period; scarcely a night passed without our
being wakened by the cry of fire.

"These frequent fires were rendered still more dreadful by villains, who
were continually on the watch to increase the confusion by which they
profited, and to pillage the houses of the sufferers. It was discovered
that these incendiaries frequently skulked, towards evening, in the
neighbourhood of the bezestein, where the richest merchants store their
goods. Some of these wretches we