A beggar in Naples who can show a foot which has all run into one horrible toe, with one shapeless nail on it, has a fortune--but such an exhibition as that would not provoke any notice in Constantinople.

The man would starve.

Who would pay any attention to attractions like his among the rare monsters that throng the bridges of the Golden Horn and display their deformities in the gutters of Stamboul?
O, wretched impostor! How could he stand against the three-legged woman, and the man with his eye in his cheek?
How would he blush in presence of the man with fingers on his elbow?
Where would he hide himself when the dwarf with seven fingers on each hand, no upper lip, and his under-jaw gone, came down in his majesty?
Bismillah! The cripples of Europe are a delusion and a fraud.

The truly gifted flourish only in the by-ways of Pera and Stamboul.
That three-legged woman lay on the bridge, with her stock in trade so disposed as to command the most striking effect--one natural leg, and two long, slender, twisted ones with feet on them like somebody else's fore-arm.

Then there was a man further along who had no eyes, and whose face was the color of a fly-blown beefsteak, and wrinkled and twisted like a lava-flow--and verily so tumbled and distorted were his features that no man could tell the wart that served him for a nose from his cheek-bones.