I believe the matter was subsequently arranged, and pratique given after a day or two; but the whole business was exceedingly absurd. Some sort of amelioration of the Levantine laws relating to quarantine was in agitation last autumn. It is high time that they were abolished, except during seasons of avowed illness and infection. But so many have said so before, and so many have experienced the wretchedness, extortion, and groundless imprisonment, calling up these remonstrances, that I will no further bore the reader, comfortably at liberty in England, with the subject. Suffice to say, that as far as Constantinople is concerned, there has not been a case of plague there for several years.
Turk in a Coffee-house.
THERAPI A AND BELGRADE.
One day, I received an invitation to stay at Therapia with a friend, who is the Constantinople correspondent for two of our papers. He came down to Pera to fetch me, and we went up the Bosphorus in a steamer. There was the same trouble to clear off—the same shattering of the Galata Bridge wood-work, and constant disturbance of the passengers, who were all apparently of the same family—that I had noticed on board the boat to Prince’s Islands.
Therapia is about an hour and a half from the Golden Horn. It was a fine Friday afternoon, and all along the sides of the Bosphorus, wherever there was a Turkish palace, the women were sitting on the walls, in every tint of costume, watching the traffic on the water. Passengers were put out and taken in at several points, always by means of boats; and they carried the same useless luggage that their compatriots had done at Prinkipo city tours istanbul.
My friend’s house was a thin wooden two-story building, that rattled and shook from the top to the bottom when anybody went up stairs, or walked about the bedrooms. There were large gaps in the floor and ceiling, and the wind came in generally at all points. Daly—as I shall call my friend—told me that once, as he was lying in bed looking at a hole in the ceiling, formed by a knot having fallen out, he saw a rat put his head through the aperture, to peep about him, and nearly get fixed there. He also told me that stone houses were not such a protection against fire as might be conceived; for, now and then, when one had caught, he had seen the flames rush up inside, from bottom to top, as though in a kiln.
Cannot imagine
All the houses at Therapia were of the same order: they are ovens in summer, and ice-bergs in winter; and I cannot imagine how the poor people keep life and soul together in them, when the freezing winds come sweeping by them from the Euxine. The windows are like ours, but without balance weights. When you have lifted them up, you keep them so by a piece of stick, or by opening a hinge ; and nowand then you disturb a scorpion in so doing. I found the mummy of a tolerably large one at the bottom of a water-jug, into which he had tumbled and died.
There is a poor hotel at Therapia, the greatest recom-mendation of which is that it is over a general shop, whereat you can procure any quantity of pale ale— an inestimable blessing where wine is atrociously bad, and decent brandy unknown. The inhabitants are all Greeks, and the women wear pretty coquettish jackets. They almost equal the Turks in their love of sitting on a high place, and doing nothing. In this case, the most popular haunt was a scrap of burying ground rising up behind and above our house, and shaded by fine trees. Here were several tombstones to the memory of English sailors; but the cutting had been committed to Greek work-people, and, in some instances, the inscriptions were intelligible with difficulty.
Mystic Bulgaria 