The mode of dealing, which in Christian Europe is stigmatised as Jewish--the system, namely, of asking thrice the value and twice what the seller means to take--is received, and by no means discreditable, in Turkish bazaars. The only way to purchase in such places, without being imposed upon, is at once to offer half the price demanded. This is met with a refusal; you walk away, the merchant calls you back, and you then offer him twenty per cent less than before. This plan Mr Smith, having picked up experience at Smyrna, put in practice at Constantinople, and generally found to answer.
Fig-packing, camels, and the slave-market are the three things which at Smyrna first attract the curiosity of the traveller from the West. Of the first-named, Mr Smith gives us a picturesque account. In the shade of a long alley of acacia and fig trees the packers were seated--Greeks by nation, and the women very handsome. "They first brought the figs from the warehouses, on the floor of which I saw hundreds of bushels, brought in on camels from the country. They were then pulled into shape, this task being confided to females; and after that sent on to the men who packed them. They gathered six or seven, one after the other, in their hand, and then wedged them into the drum, putting a few superior ones on the top, as we have seen done with strawberries." We have already mentioned that our sharp-sighted and lively traveller is somewhat of a naturalist, and here he favours us with the result of his observations upon the camel. That uncouth, but useful hunchback has been belauded and vaunted in prose and verse to such an exaggerated extent that we are quite tired of hearing of his virtues, and feel much indebted to the author of _A Month at Constantinople_ for exhibiting his failings after the following fashion:--
"Your camel is a great obtainer of pity, under false pretence. He can be as self-willed and vicious as you please; and his bite is particularly severe: when once his powerful teeth have fastened, it is with the greatest difficulty that he is made to relinquish his hold. The pitiful noise too, which he makes, as small natural historians remark, upon being overladen, is all sham. It proceeds from sheer idleness, rather than a sense of oppression. With many camels, if you make pretence to put a small object on their back--a tile or a stone, for instance--whilst they are kneeling down, they begin mechanically to bellow, and blink their eyes, and assume such a dismal appearance of suffering and anguish, that it is perfectly painful for susceptible natures to regard them. And yet, when their load is well distributed and packed, they can move along under seven hundredweight."