country on earth where curiosity and suspicion is so easily roused as
in Turkey. Kipling, who knows the East so well, portrayed Port Said
as the dwelling place of concentrated wickedness. He is right, but I
do not think he has ever visited Stamboul. In Stamboul there is with
no exception the most conglomerate mixture of nondescript
nationalities on the face of the earth. Not only are all
nationalities represented but breeds of men that defy all pathological
research, hideous in their conglomerate intermixtures. If an Albanian
bandit, himself a mixture of Greek and Nubian mulatto, has issue by an
Arab woman with French blood--find the genealogy. Can you imagine a
more difficult field of operations for an Occidental and a stranger?

In the course of my preliminary observations, I found Constantinople
to be a city of sharp contrasts. The quarters inhabited by your true
Ottoman are characteristically clean and comfortable. The remainder
of the city except foreign quarters is intolerably dirty. With true
Oriental tolerance, the Turk lets things gang their ain gait. The
casual observer and traveler always confounds the Turk with the rest
of the nondescript mass of humanity that swarms in Constantinople.
That is a crass mistake. Your true descendant of Ossman is a clean,
dignified, easy-going gentleman with a deep philosophical strain in
his make-up, contaminated by hundreds of years of contact--not
association, for your true Turk does not associate--with the outcast
Mischling of southern Europe and Asia Minor.

My mission was indeed a difficult one and only by tedious, painstaking
work, observing the life of the city and its character, I succeeded in
isolating the individual who gave me the key to the circumventuous
political life and the government of Constantinople. It took me a
full month of night work to become familiar with the innumerable