Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: by Midhat Pasha more than thirty years ago, and named after him, to the northern walls and the castle of the Seven Towers at the summit of the hill on the slopes of which the city is built; while at Constantinople not only are the seven hills of Stamboul almost entirely occupied by the homes of the Osmanlis, but they have also appropriated many a fair spot on the shores both of the Bosphorus and of the Sea of Marmora. The streets of a Turkish quarter are often, owing to their elevated situation, steep, and also for the most part winding and narrow. The pavement, if any there be, is of cobble-stones sloping towards a gutter in the centre of the roadway, which is usually ankle-deep in dust in dry, and a rushing torrent in rainy weather. In other respects, however, the streets are, generally speaking, cleaner than those of the Christian and Jewish mahallas, partly owing to the natural drainage consequent on their elevated situation, partly to the greater space available in their courtyards and gardens for the bestowal of refuse, and also to the presence in their streets of the pariah dogs who act as scavengers, and, though considered unclean animals and not admitted to the houses of Moslems, are protected and treated with kindness by them. Kindness to animals, I may here remark, is a leading trait in Turkish character; and one may often see in the streets, under a house wall, rude little temporary shelters constructed of boards and carpeted with straw for the accommodation of a canine mother and her brood of woolly pups, who speedily become the pets and protege.s of the whole mahalla. t M o Life in the Capital and in the large seaport cities of the Levant presents certain aspects not discoverable in the towns of the interior, where the population, though always composed...