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52

MEMORIES OF MY LIFE

well have accredited them, as they did, with the power of shutting like jaws and crushing vessels that attempted to pass between them, for the apparent width of the intervening space changes rapidly with changing perspective. Then we steamed through the glorious Bosphorus, whose sides were far less built upon than now, past Therapia to Constantinople, or Stamboul, as it was commonly called.

I revelled in the glory of the place and in the picturesque and turbaned groups. The hotel kept by Miseri was then a small establishment, more like a pension. He had been courier to a connection of mine, and I was taken in and made very comfortable. The numerous acquaintances I picked up there and the stories I heard of the current rascalities gave an insight into a phase of humanity which I did not esteem but was glad to know about.

Though I am now inclined to twaddle about what was then so new, so strange and exhilarating to me, it would not interest readers who are probably familiar with far more graphic accounts of this capital of the East than I have skill to write. The sherbet, iced with snow from the neighbouring Mount Olympus, shares, I suppose, with similar sherbet at Granada, iced with snow from the Sierrra Nevada, the honour of parentage to our very modern ice-creams. I n my youth the only good ice-cream maker in London was Gunter in Berkeley Square, and the very existence of such a luxury as ice-cream had then,' as I know, been recently scoffed at by the educated daughters of a clergyman in South Wales. After about six days' stay in Constantinople, I had to move onwards, taking a steamer to Smyrna. Olympus stood grandly above