A VISIT TO THE BAZAAES. 
135 
iant robes, sashes, and uniforms glitter in the sunbeams; 
the oars of the caiques flashing as if tipped with silver, and 
the busy hum of life rising over all with a mellow cheerful¬ 
ness. Along over the bridge, from end to end, flows another 
tide of life—the everlasting throng that crowd it from the 
dawn of morning to the darkness of night, and seem never 
to be done ; the Frank merchants from Pera and Galata, the 
Armenians from the bazaars of Stamboul, the Turks, Jews, 
and Copts, the Greeks, the Italians, the French, the English 
-—all the nations of the globe appear to be passirig over the 
bridge, speaking all the languages that can distort the tongue 
of man, wearing all the varieties of costume that can disfigure 
or give dignity to the form, and engaged in all the different 
pursuits that occupy the human brain ; the very vision, 
brought into glorious reality, that has haunted you from 
early youth in your dreams of the East. A voluptuous soft¬ 
ness, an odor of strange incenses fills the glowing atmosphere, 
a harmony of lights and shadows and vistas of golden haze 
and soft purple distances, that never so charmed the senses 
before, save in the earliest glimpses of the beautiful, when 
the heart was warm with youth and the spirit looked up in 
its freshness through the realms of fancy. Now turn inward 
the stream of thought, and upon its surface arise a thousand 
happy memories of the past, gliding back with it as it flows, 
till the soul wanders again in mystic worlds, where dwell in¬ 
habitants with crowns of diamonds and robes of precious fab¬ 
rics worked in gold, and white wands; and fairy castles are 
seen, and mountains of amber and pearl rise up and change 
into strange forms and vanish, as the clouds of a summer’s 
eve. But this is all romance, aroused by outward show. 
There is as much sad reality in the City of the Sultan as any 
where else—a good deal more than you are prepared for after 
reading Miss Pardoe or Lady Montague. Don’t give way to 
any weakness of this kind any more if you can help it. It 
makes one feel miserable when he wakes up—-just like a nice 
mint-julep about bed-time and a bad headache the next 
morning. 
Close by the bridge is a boat station, where some hundreds 
