University of Virginia Library

I had many unhappy thoughts about Miamuna. The
glance I had snatched on board the Trebizond slaver
left in my memory a pair of dark eyes full of uneasiness
and doubt, and I knew her elastic motions so well,
that there was something in her single step as she came
over the gang-way which assured me that she was dispirited
and uncertain of her errand. Who was the
old Turk who dragged her up the vessel's side with so
little ceremony? What could the child of a gipsy be
doing on the deck of a slaver from Trebizond?

With no very definite ideas as to the disposal of this
lovely child should I succeed in my wishes, I had insensibly
made up my mind that she could never be
happy without me, and that my one object in Constantinople
was to get her into my possession. I had a
delicacy in communicating the full extent of my design
to Job, for, aside from the grave view he would take
of the morality of the step, and her probable fate as a
woman, he would have painful and just doubts of my
ability to bear this additional demand upon my means.
Though entirely dependent himself, Job had that natural
contempt for the precious metals, that he could

not too freely assist any one to their possession who
happened to set a value on the amount in his pocket;
and this, I may say, was the one point which, between
my affectionate monster and myself, was not discussed
as harmoniously as the loves of Corydon and Alexis.
The account of his expenditure, which I regularly exacted
of him before he tied on his bandana at night,
was always more or less unsatisfactory; and though
he would not have hesitated to bestow a whole scudo
unthinkingly on the first dirty dervish he should meet,
he was still sufficiently impressed with the necessity
of economy to remember it in an argument of any
length or importance; and for this and some other
reasons I reserved my confidence upon the intended
addition to my suite.

Not far from the Burnt Column, in the very heart
of Stamboul, lived an old merchant in attar and jessamine,
called Mustapha. Every one who has been at
Constantinople will remember him and his Nubian
slave in a small shop on the right, as you ascend to
the Hippodrome. He calls himself essence-seller to
the Sultan, but his principal source of profit is the
stranger who is brought to his divans by the interpreters
in his pay; and to his credit be it said, that for the
courtesy of his dealings, and for the excellence of his
extracts, the stranger could not well fall into better
hands.

It had been my fortune, on my first visit to Mustapha,
to conciliate his good will. I had laid in my
small stock of spice-woods and essences on that occasion,
and the call which I made religiously every time
I crossed the Golden Horn was purely a matter of
friendship. In addition to one or two trifling presents,
which (with a knowledge of human nature) I
had returned in the shape of two mortal sins—a keg
of brandy and a flask of gin, bought out of the English

collier lying in the bay; in addition to his kind
presents, I say, my large-trowsered friend had made
me many pressing offers of service. There was little
probability, it was true, that I should ever find occasion
to profit by them; but I nevertheless believed
that his hand was laid upon his heart in earnest sincerity,
and in the course of my reflections upon the fate of
Maimuna, it had occurred to me more than once that
he might be of use in clearing up the mystery of her
motions.

“Job!” said I, as we were dawdling along the street
of confectioners with our Jew behind us one lovely
morning, “I am going to call at Mustapha's.”

We had started to go to the haunt of the opium-eaters,
and he was rather surprised at my proposition,
but, with his usual amiableness, (very inconvenient
and vexatious in this particular instance,) he stepped
over the gutter without saying a word, and made for
the first turning to the right. It was the first time
since we had left New-England that I wished myself
rid of his company.

“But, Job,” said I, calling him back to the shady
side of the street, and giving him a great lump of candy
from the nearest stall (its Oriental name, by the way,
is “peace-to-your-throat,”) “I thought you were bent
on eating opium to-day?”

My poor friend looked at me for a minute, as if to
comprehend the drift of my remark, and as he arrived
by regular deduction at the result, I read very clearly
in his hideous physiognomy the painful embarrassment
it occasioned him. It was only the day before, that,
in descending the Bosphorus, we had seen a party of
the summary administrators of justice quietly suspending
a Turkish woman and her Greek paramour from
the shutters of a chamber window—intercourse with a
Christian in that country of liberal legislation being
punishable without trial or benefit of dervish. From

certain observations on my disposition in the course of
my adventures, Job had made up his mind, I well
knew, that my danger was more from Dalilah than the
Philistines; and while these victims of love were kicking
their silken trowsers in the air, I saw, by the look
of tender anxiety he cast upon me from the bottom of
the caique, that the moral in his mind would result in
an increased vigilance over my motions. While he
stood with his teeth stuck full of “peace-to-your-throat,”
therefore, forgetting even the instinct of mastication
in his surprise and sorrow, I well understood
what picture was in his mind, and what construction
he put upon my sudden desire to solitude.

“My dear Philip!” he began, speaking with difficulty
from the stickiness of the candy in his teeth,
“your respected mother—”

At this instant a kervas, preceding a Turk of rank,
jostled suddenly against him, and as the mounted Mussulman,
with his train of runners and pipe-bearers,
came sweeping by, I took the opportunity of Job's surprise
to slip past with the rest, and, turning down an
alley, quietly mounted one of the saddle-horses standing
for hire at the first mosque, and pursued my way
alone to the shop of the attar-merchant. To dismount
and hurry Mustapha into his inner and private apartment,
with an order to the Nubian to deny me to everybody
who should inquire, was the work of a minute,
but it was scarcely done before I heard Job breathless
at the door.

“Ha visto il signore?” he exclaimed, getting to the
back of the shop with a single stride.

“Effendi, no!” said the imperturbable Turk, and he
laid his hand on his heart, as he advanced, and offered
him with grave courtesy the pipe from his lips.

The Jew had come puffing into the shop with his
slippers in his hand, and dropping upon his hams near
the door, he took off his small grey turban, and was

wiping the perspiration from his high and narrow forehead,
when Job darted again into the street with a
sign to him to follow. The look of despair and exhaustion
with which he shook out his baggy trowsers
and made after the striding Yankee, was too much even
for the gravity of Mustapha. He laid aside his pipe,
and, as the Nubian struck in with the peculiar cackle
of his race, I joined myself in their meriment with a
heartiness to which many a better joke might have
failed to move me.

While Mustapha was concluding his laugh between
the puffs of his amber pipe, I had thrown myself along
the divan, and was studying with some curiosity the
inner apartment in which I had been concealed. A
curtain of thick but tarnished gold cloth (as sacred
from intrusion in the East as the bolted and barred
doors of Europe) separated from the outer shop a
small octagonal room, that, in size and furniture, resembled
the Turkish boudoirs, which, in the luxurious
palaces of Europe, sometimes adjoin a lady's chamber.
The slippered foot was almost buried in the rich carpets
laid, but not fitted to the floor. The divans were
covered with the flowered and lustrous silk of Brusa,
and piled with vari-colored cushions. A perpetual
spice-lamp sent up its thin wreaths of smoke to the
black and carved ceiling, diffusing through the room a
perfume which, while it stole to the innermost fibres of
the brain with a sense of pleasure, weighed on the eyelids
and relaxed the limbs; and as the eye became more
accustomed to the dim light which struggled in from a
window in the arched ceiling, and dissolved in the luxurious
and spicy atmosphere, heaps of the rich shawls
of the East became distinguishable with their sumptuous
dyes, and, in a corner, stood a cluster of crystal
narghiles, faintly reflecting the light in their dim globes
of rose water, while costly pipes, silver-mounted pistols,

and a rich Damascus sabre in a sheath of red velvet,
added gorgeousness to the apartment.

Mustapha was a bit of a philosoper in his way, and
he had made his own observations on the Europeans
who came to his shop. The secluded and oriental luxuriousness
of the room I have described was one of
his lures to that passion for the picturesque which he
saw in every traveler; and another was his gigantic
Nubian, who, with bracelets and anklets of gold, a
white turban, and naked legs and arms, stood always
at the door of his shop, inviting the passers-by---not to
buy essences and pastilles---but to come in and take
sherbet with his master. You will have been an hour
upon his comfortable divans, have smoked a pipe or
two, and eaten a snowy sherbet or a dish of rice-paste
and sugar, before Mustapha nods to his slave, and produces
his gold-rimmed jars of essences, from which,
with his fat forefinger, he anoints the palm of your
hand, or, with a compliment to the beauty of your hair,
throws a drop into the curl on your temples. Meanwhile,
as you smoke, the slave lays in the bowl of your
pipe a small pastille wrapped in gold leaf, from which
presently arrives to your nostrils a perfume that might
delight a Sultan; and then, from the two black hands
which are held to you full of cubical-edged phials with
gilded stoppers, you are requested with the same bland
courtesy to select such as in size or shape suit your
taste and convenience---the smallest of them, when
filled with attar, worth near a gold piastre.

This is not very ruinous, and your next temptation
comes in the shape of a curiously-wrought censer,
upon the filagree grating of which is laid strips of odorent
wood which, with the heat of the coals beneath,
give out a perfume like gums from Araby. This,
Mustapha swears to you by his beard, has a spell in its
spicy breath provocative as a philtre, and is to be burnt
in your lady's chamber. It is worth its weight in

gold, and for a handful of black chips you are persuaded
to pay a price which would freight a caique
with cinnamon. Then come bracelets, and amulets,
and purses, all fragrant and precious, and, while you
hesitate, the Nubian brings you coffee that would open
the heart of Shylock, and you drink and purchase.
And when you have spent all your money, you go away
delighted with Mustapha, and quite persuaded that you
are vastly obliged to him. And, all things considered,
so you are!

When Mustapha had finished his prayers, (did I say
that it was noon?) he called in the Nubian to roll up
the sacred carpet, and then closing the curtain between
us and the shop, listened patiently to my story of the
Gipsy, which I told him faithfully from the beginning.
When I arrived at the incident on board the slaver, a
sudden light seemed to strike upon his mind.

“Pekhe, filio mio! pekhe!” he exclaimed, running
his forefinger down the middle of his beard, and pouring
out a volume of smoke from his mouth and nostrils
which obscured him for a moment from my sight.

(I dislike the introduction of foreign words into a
story, but the Turkish dissyllable in the foregoing sentence
is as constantly on an Eastern lip as the amber
of the pipe.)

He clapped his hands as I finished my narration,
and the Nubian appeared. Some conversation passed
between them in Turkish, and the slave tightened his
girdle, made a salaam, and, taking his slippers at the
outer door, left the shop.

We shall find her at the slave market,” said Mustapha.

I started. The thought had once or twice passed
through my mind, but I had as often rejected it as impossible.
A freeborn Zingara, and on a confidential
errand from her own mother!---I did not see how her

freedom, if there were danger, should have been so
carelessly put in peril.

“And if she is there!” said I; remembering, first,
that it was against the Mahommedan law for a Christian
to purchase a slave, and next, that the price, if it did
not ruin me at once, would certainly leave me in a situation
rather to lessen than increase my expenses.

“I will buy her for you,” said Mustapha.

The Nubian returned at this moment, and laid at my
feet a bundle of wearing apparel. He then took from
a shelf a shaving apparatus, with which he proceeded
to lather my forehead and temples, and after a short
argument with Mustapha, in which I pleaded in vain
for two very seducing clusters of curls, those caressed
minions dropped into the black hand of the slave, and
nothing was left for the petits soins of my thumb and
forefinger in their leisure hours save a well-coaxed and
rather respectable moustache. A skull-cap and turban
completed the transformation of my head, and then,
with some awkardness, I got into a silk shirt, big trowsers,
jacket, and slippers, and stood up to look at myself
in the mirror. I was as like one of the common Turks
of the street as possible, save that the European cravat
and stockings had preserved an unoriental whiteness in
my neck and ankles. This was soon remedied with
a little brown juice, and after a few cautions from
Mustapha as to my behavior, I settled my turban and
followed him into the street.

It is a singular sensation to be walking about in a
strange costume, and find that nobody looks surprised.
I could not avoid a slight feeling of mortification at
the rude manner with which every dirty Mussulman
took the wall of me. After long travel in foreign
lands, the habit of everywhere exciting notice as a
stranger, and the species of consequence attached to
the person and movements of a traveler, become
rather pleasures than otherwise, and it is not without

pain that one finds oneself once more like common
people. I have not yet returned to my own land,
(Slingsby is an American, gentle reader,) and cannot
judge, therefore, how far this feeling is modified by
the pleasures of a recovered home; but I was vexed
not to be stared at when playing the Turk at Constantinople,
and, amusing as it was to be taken for an
Englishman on first arriving in England, (different as
it is from every land I have seen, and still more different
from my own,) I must confess to have experienced
again a feeling of lessened consequence, when, on my
first entrance into an hotel in London, I was taken for
an Oxonian “come up for a lark” in term time. Perhaps
I have stumbled in this remark upon one of those
unconfessed reasons why a returned traveler is proverbially
discontented with his home.

Whether Mustapha wished to exhibit his new pipe-bearer
to his acquaintances, or whether there was fun
enough in his obese composition to enjoy my difficulties
in adapting myself to my new circumstances, I
cannot precisely say; but I soon found that we were
not going straight to the slave-market. I had several
times forgotten my disguise so far as to keep the narrow
walk till I stood face to face with the bearded
Mussulmen, who were only so much astonished at my
audacity that they forgot to kick me over the gutter;
and passing, in the bazaar of saddle-cloths, an English
officer of my acquaintance, who belonged to the
corvette lying in the Bosphorus, I could not resist the
temptation of whispering in his ear the name of his
sweetheart, (which he had confided to me over a bottle
at Smyrna,) though I rather expected to be seized
by the turban the next moment, with the pleasant consequences
of a mob and an exposure. My friend was
so thoroughly amazed, however, that I was deep in
the crowd before he had drawn breath, and I look
daily now for his arrival in England, (I have not seen

him since,) with a curiosity to know how he supposes
a “blackguard Turk” knew anything of the lock of
hair he carried in his waistcoat pocket.

The essence-seller had stopped in the book-bazaar,
and was condescendingly smoking a pipe, with his
legs crossed on the counter of a venerable Armenian,
who sat buried to the chin in his own wares, when
who should come pottering along (as Mrs. Butler would
say) but Job with his Jew behind him. Mustapha
(probably unwilling to be seen smoking with an Armenian)
had ensconced himself behind a towering
heap of folios, and his vexed and impatient pipe-bearer
had taken his more humble position on the narrow
base of one of the chequered columns which are peculiar
to the bazaar devoted to the bibliopolists. As
my friend came floundering along “all abroad” with
his legs and arms, as usual, I contrived, by an adroit
insertion of one of my feet between his, to spread him
over the musty tomes of the Armenian in a way calculated
to derange materially the well-ordered sequence
of the volumes.

“Allah! Mashallah!” exclaimed Mustapha, whose
spreading lap was filled with black-letter copies of the
Khoran, while the bowl of his pipe was buried in the
fallen pyramid.

“Bestia Inglese!” muttered the Armenian, as Job
put one hand in the inkstand in endeavoring to rise,
and with the next effort laid his blackened fingers on
a heap of choice volumes bound in snowy vellum.

The officious Jew took up the topmost copy, marked
like a cinq-foil with his spreading thumb and fingers,
and quietly asked the Armenian what Il Signore would
be expected to pay. As I knew he had no money in
his pocket, I calculated safely on this new embarrassment
to divert his anger from the original cause of his
overthrow.

“Tre colonati,” said the bookseller.

Job opened the book, and his well-known guttural
of surprise and delight assured me that I might come
out from behind the column and look over his shoulder.
It was an illuminated copy of Hafiz, with a
Latin translation,—a treasure which his heart had
been set upon from our first arrival in the East,
and for which I well knew he would sell his coat
off his back without hesitation. The desire to give
it him passed through my mind, but I could see
no means, under my present circumstances, either
of buying the book or relieving him from his embarrassment;
and as he buried his nose deeper between
the leaves, and sat down on the low counter,
forgetful alike of his dilemma and his lost friend, I
nodded to Mustapha to get off as quietly as possible,
and, fortunately slipping past both him and the
Jew unrecognized, left him to finish the loves of
Gulistan and settle his account with the incensed
Armenian.