notorious Kuprili.

H.G. Dwight[369] writing on the present day Turkish coffee house, says:

[Illustration: ROASTING COFFEE BEFORE A CAFE, TURKEY]

There are thoroughfares in any Turkish city that carry on almost no
other form of traffic. There is no quarter so miserable or so
remote as to be without one or two. They are the clubs of the
poorer classes. Men of a street, a trade, a province, or a
nationality--for a Turkish coffee-house may also be Albanian,
Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Kurd, almost anything you please--meet
regularly when their work is done, at coffee-houses kept by their
own people. So much are the humbler coffee-houses frequented by a
fixed clientele that a student of types or dialects may realize for
himself how truly they used to be called Schools of Knowledge.

The arrangement of a Turkish coffee-house is of the simplest. The
essential is that the place should provide the beverage for which
it exists and room for enjoying the same. A sketch of a coffee-shop
may often be seen on the street, in a scrap of shade or sunshine
according to the season, where a stool or two invite the passer-by
to a moment of contemplation. Larger establishments, though they
are rarely very large, are most often installed in a room longer
than it is wide, having as many windows as possible at the street
end and what we would call the bar at the other. It is a bar that
always makes me regret I do not etch, with its pleasing curves, its
high lights of brass and porcelain striking out of deep shadow, and
its usually picturesque _kahvehji_.

You do not stand at it. You sit on one of the benches running down
the sides of the room. They are more or less comfortably cushioned,
though sometimes higher and broader than a foreigner finds to his
taste. In that case you slip off your shoes, if you would do as the
Romans do, and tuck your feet up under you. A table stands in front
of you to hold your coffee--and often in summer an aromatic pot of
basil to keep the flies away. Chairs or stools are scattered about.
Decorative Arabic texts, sometimes wonderful prints, adorn the
walls. There may even be hanging rugs and china to entertain your
eyes. And there you are.

The habit of the coffee-house is one that requires a certain
leisure. You must not bolt coffee as you bo