s of the country. The diners at Valori's made up
the first really polyglot assembly I had ever seen. There were Bulgarian
notables--caring apparently to speak their own language only--Spanish
Jews from Eski Zaghra, Greeks, Turks, Germans, Italians, Armenians,
Englishmen, native volunteers for the Polish legion then forming, and a
Croat gentleman with bejewelled handles to his private arsenal of lethal
weapons, and starched expansive white petticoats. Our major-domo was
somehow equal to them all, and when the rush of service was partly
over, I found an opportunity to ask him how many languages he spoke.
He answered in a tone of apology and regret: "Onily twelluv, ich habe
vergessen les autres!"

A day or two later I encountered the official interpreter of the Persian
Embassy who spoke English as perfectly as I did and apparently all the
languages of the civilised world beside. I asked him seriously how many
tongues he professed to have mastered, and his reply was this: "If you
ask me in how many languages and dialects I can converse, I suppose I
should have to say seventy or eighty, but if you confine me to those in
which I can construct a grammar I should have to tell you fifteen at
the outside. No man can really say he knows a language until he can
construct a grammar for it."

So much for a special detached faculty which I have found in the
possession of people who are otherwise entirely stupid.

The utter lawlessness of the Asiatic troops, by whom Constantinople was
supposed to be defended, gave me a fair foretaste of things to come.

It was certainly rather a curious thing that in a country about which
I travelled freely, and which was overrun by the most murderous ravage,
months passed before I heard a shot fired. It so fell out that I was
the discoverer of the fields of massacre in the district of the Rose
Gardens. I found twelve hundred unburied dead, all hacked and mutilated,
in a vineyard near Kesanlyk. I found Kalofer a smoking wilderness,
without a living soul left out of a population of twelve hundred. I
found Sopot a howling desolation, where only the village dogs were left
alive. Day by day, for weeks, I travelled stealthily in the rear of the
roving bands of Bashi-Bazouks and Zeibecks who were laying the country
waste and slaughtering its Christian population; but it was more than an
Englishman's life was worth to show himself among them, and I never came
near enough to see them actually engaged upon t