Chapter 38 - Page 2

a realm which--"

The Emperor--"Oh, d--n the Address!--read it to the police.
Chamberlain, take these people over to my brother, the Grand Duke's, and
give them a square meal. Adieu! I am happy--I am gratified--I am
delighted--I am bored. Adieu, adieu--vamos the ranch! The First Groom
of the Palace will proceed to count the portable articles of value
belonging to the premises."

The farce then closed, to be repeated again with every change of the
watches, and embellished with new and still more extravagant inventions
of pomp and conversation.

At all times of the day and night the phraseology of that tiresome
address fell upon our ears. Grimy sailors came down out of the foretop
placidly announcing themselves as "a handful of private citizens of
America, traveling simply for recreation and unostentatiously," etc.; the
coal passers moved to their duties in the profound depths of the ship,
explaining the blackness of their faces and their uncouthness of dress,
with the reminder that they were "a handful of private citizens,
traveling simply for recreation," etc., and when the cry rang through the
vessel at midnight: "EIGHT BELLS!--LARBOARD WATCH, TURN OUT!" the
larboard watch came gaping and stretching out of their den, with the
everlasting formula: "Aye-aye, sir! We are a handful of private citizens
of America, traveling simply for recreation, and unostentatiously, as
becomes our unofficial state!"

As I was a member of the committee, and helped to frame the Address,
these sarcasms came home to me. I never heard a sailor proclaiming
himself as a handful of American citizens traveling for recreation, but I
wished he might trip and fall overboard, and so reduce his handful by one
individual, at least. I never was so tired of any one phrase as the
sailors made me of the opening sentence of the Address to the Emperor of
Russia.

This seaport of Smyrna, our first notable acquaintance in Asia, is a
closely packed city of one hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, and,
like Constantinople, it has no outskirts. It is as closely packed at its
outer edges as it is in the centre, and then the habitations leave
suddenly off and the plain beyond seems houseless. It is just like any
other Oriental city. That is to say, its Moslem houses are heavy and
dark, and as comfortless as so many tombs; its streets are crooked,
rudely and roughly paved, and as narrow as an ordinary staircase; the
streets uniformly carry a man to any other place than the one he wants to
go to, and surprise him by landing him in the most unexpected localities;
business is chiefly carried on in great covered bazaars, celled like a
honeycomb with innumerable shops no larger