Punch (71.1876)

iv

PUNCH, OE THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

[January 6, 1877.

with gold lace. "And they expect us to make a job of it!" cliorussed the Nine, each taking a .tug in a different
direction at the rotten abomination, which I thought would have been rent to pieces in my hand.

" Cut it into lists, to nail up the shoots of the Panslavonian family-tree with "—shouted Ignatieff, who seemed to
take the lead among his Nine confreres.

"Ditto to you!" shouted the reticent old Prussian, who seemed to have no mind, or at least showed no hand,
of his own.

" There! You see his little game :•—Divide and appropriate. Trust him with the mending of this poor dear
old coat!" groaned the unhappy Elliot.

" Which you've been helping to botch, till it will botch no longer," interrupted the new hand from Salisbury,
turning on him sharply.

"If only you'd respect its integrity ! " groaned the sorely snubbed Elliott, while the Austrian tailors whispered;
when suddenly a great noise was heard outside—cannons and trumpets, cheers, and acclamations
"What is it?" I asked Ignatieff.

" Only Midhat blowing another bubble," remarked the Russian, with perfect composure. " Bless you, we 're used to
it. They've been at that game for the last forty years. The Gulhani bubble was quite as big as this, and they shouted
quite as loud over it. But what came of it and the dozen they've blown since, but dissolution into empty air, after serving to
set Europe—with England at its head—agape, while the sharp Osmanli swell-mob picked their pockets."

Just then, Safvet, a Turkish tailor, popping his head in at the door, begged them to come out and look at Midhat's
beautiful constitution. He was shortly and sharply dismissed with a flea in his ear.

" Don't you agree with me," resumed Ignatieff, " that the old coat is past patching, and that the best thing would be
to cut it up into little garments for the Young Turkeys I hope to hatch one day," and he winked.

" The best thing you can do," I said, "would be to chuck this filthy old rag into the dust-hole, with all the moths and
other vermin that have harboured in its foulness, and cut out another garment for Turkey of sound strong Government stuff
—the only one to wear well. But you must see that your measures are carefully taken, and above all, if you mean the coat
to fit, you must send your own foremen to see it tried on, and keep the old vermin out of the new garment."

Here a renewal of the row outside interrupted the applause that greeted my allocution. This time it was Midhat who
burst in on our deliberation.

"AVho talks of a new coat, and of sending giaours of Frankish foremen to try it on? The old coat is quite good
enough for us, when ice've mended it, as we mean to do—arrange it afresh, in fact, from skirt to collar, on the latest French
pattern. Besides, after all, the more patches the better shelter-"

" For the vermin," interrupted the young man from Salisbury, sternly; " not for the wearer. Midhat, mizzle ! "

Thus roughly apostrophised, the Pasha first scowled, then squared, on which the young man from Salisbury, seizing
the scruff ofhis neck with one hand, twisted the other in the waistbaud of his voluminous nether garments, and, before I could
interpose, Midhat was flying through the window towards the blue waters of the Golden Horn.

" The poor devil shan't drown, if I can help it! " I shouted, rushing to the window.

"He'll only pull you under," remonstrated Ignatieff; and there'll be two drowned instead of one."

" Let me go ! " I exclaimed. " Have I not my life-raft?" and, shaking him off, I flung up the window. A struggle, a
shout, a sheer-down dive, an irrepressible up-shoot to the surface, and I was floating on my own insubmergible bottom, and
holding up Midhat by the slack of his very loose inexpressibles. The Turk was saved, for rescuer and rescued together rode
the blue billows of the Bosphorus on the buoyant pages of