WAIFS AND STRAYS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 187, 27 October 1876, Page 15

WAIFS AND STRAYS.

Constantinople is the most temperate capital of its size in the world. Spending day after day in the open air, wandering among the common folks, having at one time several people in my employ, even in the biting air before daylight I never found any Turk drinking stronger beverage than coffee. But thai; is nothiDg to their great annual fast. During the Ramadan, which lasts a whole month, from sunrise to sunset the panting boatman, the heavy-laden porter will touch nothing like food, not even tobacco, and no drink whatever ; and at sundown will make up for this abstinence, not by a drunken carouse, but by a larger dish of pilau and a longer smoke of Latakia. To be sure, temperance is a part of the Turk's religion, but is it not of ours ? And that religion — an imposture as we call it — has something very real in its worship at four in the morning the year round, its "infidel" gaze, the heartiness of all its observances, the severity of its daily self-denials. Often have I found the shop entirely open while the shopman wa3 at his prayers, and I have taken up the goods to see if anybody would remonstrate, and laid them down again without anybody's interference. And how often have I watched the thinclad boatman kneeling in prayer on the wet sand or in drizzling rain, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot ! "—Rev. F. W. Holland, in ' Lippincott's Magazine.' Do not laugh at the drunken man reeling through the street, however ludicrous the sight may be; just stop to think. He is going home to some tender heart that will throb with intense agony, some doting mother, perhaps, who will grieve over the downfall of her once sinless boy ; or it may be a fond wife, whose heart will almost burst with grief as she views the destruction of her idol, or it may be a loving sister who will shed bitter tears over the degradation of her brother, shorn of manliness and self-respect.