We had stepped back into the last century. Here was the calamus still in use. The small, brown reed, not yet superseded by the more useful but less classic quill, stood in every clotted inkstand, and nothing less than the purchase of a whole scrivener’s furniture, from a bearded bookworm, whose benevolent face took my fancy, would suffice my enthusiasm. Not to waste all our oriental experience at a single stall, we strolled farther on to buy an illuminated Hafiz. We stopped simultaneously before an old Armenian who seemed, by his rusty calpack and shabby robe, to be something poorer than even his plainly-clad neighbours: for in Turkey, as elsewhere, he who lives in a world of his own, has but a slender portion in that of the vulgar. A choice-looking volume lay open upon one of the old man’s knees, while from a wooden bowl he was eating hastily a pottage of rice. His meal was evidently an interruption. He had not even laid aside his book.
There was something in his handling the volume, as he took down a pocket-sized Hafiz, that showed an affection for the author. He turned it over with a slight dilation of countenance, and opening it with a careful thumb, read a line in mellifluous Persian. I took it from him open at the place, and marked the passage with my nail, to look for it in the translation.
With my cheaply-bought treasures in my pockets, we turned up the street of the diamond merchants, and making a single purchase more in the bazaar, of a tesbih or Turkish rosary of spice-wood, emerged to the open air in the neighbourhood of the mosque of Sultan Bajazet.
Whether slipping the pagan beads through my fingers affected me devoutly, or whether it was the mellow humour of the moment, I felt a disposition to forgive my enemies, and indulge in an act of Mohammedan piety—feeding the unowned dogs of the street. We stepped into a baker’s shop, and laid out a piastre in bread, and were immediately observed and surrounded, before we could break a loaf, by twenty or thirty as ill-looking curs, as ever howled to the moon. Having distributed about a dozen loaves, and finding that our largess had by no means satisfied the appetites of the expecting rabble, we found ourselves embarrassed to escape. Nothing but the baker’s threshold prevented them from jumping upon us, in their eagerness, and the array of so many formidable mouths ferocious with hunger, was rather staggering. The baker drew off the hungry pack at last, by walking round the corner with a loaf in his hand, while we made a speedy exit, patted on the back in passing by several of the assembled spectators.