The first visible annoyance in Constantinople is dogs, which Murray’s guide says is nobody’s property. In a space of a rod I counted seventy-four dogs, and not one respectable dog in the seventy-four! fifteen or twenty of them were marked on different parts of the body with scalds, some with only one ear, some blind, the streets were lined with them, lying down, standing up, fighting, breeding, and making love. The Turks are as particular about getting around and through them, as a good man would be in a crowd of children; in fact, I saw a Turk tread upon a child in an effort to pass around dogs. They take no notice of persons passing to and fro, but if you touch one, he jumps at you and lays hold.

During the night we have a long dog-note howl, from dark to daylight, and there is no way to stop it; they have systematical skirmishes of parties from different sections. Murray holds that they have fundamental laws of infringement, and woe be to him that don’t acknowledge their legality. The puppies, as soon as they open their eyes, he observes, join in the first fight, and off goes his ear, tail, or leg, and he grows up used to hardships, and the customs and responsibilities of war; he is also taught the responsibility of invasion. Before he learns the landmarks, he goes on another’s territory, where he is picked up by some old sentinel and shook a little, and thrown across the border, where he stands and barks a little, in defiance of the old dog’s pluck and courage to come on this “spot and do the like. In their hymenial adventures” they frequently cross the borders, in pursuit of their object of affection, when there is a free fight, that lasts until some devoted amour falls a martyr to his sincerity, whilst the object of his affection escapes, heedless of his fidelity, and his great care for her and his posterity.

The virtue of keeping so many dogs in Constantinople, is to cleanse the streets of offal, that is piled there by the citizens, who are not blessed with sink holes under the streets, they empty their swill, bad vegetables, and scraps of all corruption in the middle of the streets, and the dogs act the buzzard’s part, or the cholera would reign supreme all the year round. When the citizens are fearful of hydrophobia, the Sultan orders the dogs to be driven in herds to a lake a few miles from the city, and there to stay during the dog days; but when they are brought back, the city is generally raging with what they call in the east, the plague. If the city was blessed with sink holes, they could then dispense with the nuisance of dogs in such narrow streets, and the provocation of their efforts of progeny. They are frequently so close together that a man hardly ever takes notice of their condition to one another. I, trying to pass through a group, got entangled between two and fell over them, as it was impossible to get through, a............