[4] The names of the various districts of Constantinople, sometimes rather indiscriminately used in travellers' narratives, are apt to puzzle those readers unfamiliar with the divisions of the city. The following note puts its distribution clearly before them:--"_Stamboul_ may be termed Constantinople proper, inhabited by the Turks, and containing the Seraglio, chief mosques, great public offices, bazaars, and places of Government and general business. It is the most ancient and most important part, _par excellence_. _Galata_ is the Wapping of the city: here we find dirty shops for ships' stores; merchants' counting-houses, and tipsy sailors. _Tophanné_ is so called from the large gun-factory close at hand. Both these suburbs are situated at the base of a very steep hill; the upper part of which is _Pera_, the district allotted to the Franks, or foreigners, and containing the palaces of the ambassadors, the hotels, the European shops, and the most motley population under the sun. _Scutari_ is to Stamboul as Birkenhead to Liverpool, and is in Asia. It is important in its way, as being the starting-place of all the caravans going inland. There are some other districts of less interest to the average tourist."--_A Month at Constantinople_, p. 46.
At Constantinople, as at Smyrna, Mr Smith visited the slave market. There is a volume in the word, and we all know the sort of phantasmagoria it summons up for the benefit of English ladies and gentlemen, as they sit at home at ease, dandling their fancies by the chimney corner. Exeter Hall and the picture shops have made slave-markets of their own, compared to which the reality is a tame and spiritless affair. We are all familiar, at a proper distance, with that group of young ladies, more or less nude, and of every tint--from the pale Georgian to the sable Ethiop--huddled together in great alarm and the most graceful attitudes, whilst a shawled and jewelled Turk scans their perfections with licentious eye, and counts gold into the palm of a truculent dealer in human flesh. None of us but have been painfully affected by representations, both printed and pictorial, of whips and manacles, fettered hands and striped shoulders, kneeling negroes and barbarous taskmasters, whereby tender-hearted gentlemen are moved to unbutton their pockets, and philanthropical ladies of excitable nerve, overlooking the misery that is often close to their doors, are set sewing flannels for remote blacks. We have all seen this sort of thing, and have been interested and touched accordingly. But Mr Smith, in the most unfeeling manner, robs us of our illusions, so far, at least, as Smyrna or Constantinople are concerned. In the slave-market at the latter place--where blacks only are exposed, the Circassian and Georgian beauties being secluded in the dealers' houses--he arrived at the conclusion that the creatures he saw wrapped in their blankets and crouching in corners, and in whom sense and feeling were evidently at the very lowest ebb, had much better chance of such happiness as they were capable of enjoying, if sold as slaves than if left to their own savage resources.