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SHORT TOUR TO THE EAST

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quarantine off Ancona, and was landed in the quarantine at Trieste. What Turkey was to Greece in respect of quarantine, that Greece was to Turkey.

There was a curious custom at Trieste of " making SO oglio," as they phrased it. When three or four days of the normal length of quarantine had still to run, it was permissible to strip and leave all clothes behind, to bathe, to put on new clothes, and to be free. The process is based on the assumption that the wellwashed human body, if in apparent health after say a week's seclusion, may justly be considered free from infection, whereas the clothes worn by it must remain still longer in quarantine. What happened was this. We were inspected by the doctor, and then directed to the edge of a covered quay, opposite to which was another quay where old-clothes men displayed their wares ; a strip of sea water, perhaps 4 or 5 feet deep and 20 wide, separated the two quays. A bargain had to be made with one of the old-clothes men by shouting across the water. I was to leave everything I had on me, excepting coin or other metal, and papers which were about to be fumigated, in exchange for the offered clothes. When the bargain was concluded, I stripped, plunged in, and emerged on the opposite quay stark naked, to be newly clothed and to receive freedom. The clothes-man got my old things in due time-that was his affair. The new clothes were thin, and the trousers were made of a sort of calico and deficient in the fashionable cut of my old ones ; but as it was not then late in the year the thinness mattered little in those latitudes, and I did not care about the rest.

I occupied two of the days I had saved by making