evidence against them, and in the meantime the gaols were growing more dangerously crowded every day. There was undoubtedly some personal feeling for ’Abdu’l Ḥamîd, but it was rare. I made the acquaintance of a citizen of Môṣul, a splendid type of the old school, for whom it was impossible not to feel sympathy, even though I know him to have been one of the instigators of the murder of Sheikh Sayyid: this man watched from a room in the serai the proclamation of Muḥammad V, and when he saw the soldiery tear down and trample under foot edicts which were signed with ’Abdu’l Ḥamîd’s name, he, being alone but for one other, who was my informant, threw himself upon the ground and wept. “The dogs!” he cried. “Yesterday they would have been proud if their name had been mentioned in the same breath with his.” To me he was more guarded; moreover he had had time to recover his balance. But he predicted wreck and ruin, bloodshed, revolution and all other evils for his country. “Is there no remedy?” said I. “If the source is pure the whole stream is pure,” he answered enigmatically. “Was the source pure?” I asked. He hesitated a moment, and then replied: “No, by God and the Prophet! A king should go about among his subjects, see them and hear them. He should not sit imprisoned in his house, listening to the talk of spies.” I know another, poles asunder from the first, one of the richest men in the town and one of the most evil: a slave by birth, he might not sit in the presence of his former master, although the master, great gentleman as he was, could scarcely outmatch the wealth of the liberated slave. Him I asked whether there was any strength behind the Arab movement. “The Khalîfah should be of the tribe of the Ḳureish,” he answered significantly. “Who would be Khalîfah if he were chosen from out of the Ḳureish?” I asked. “The Sherîf of Mecca is of that blood,” he answered. “The Arabs would govern themselves.” He left me to reflect upon his words, for I was well aware that if he chose to support them with force, all the rogues with whom the city abounds were at his command, and all the plots and counterplots of the vilayet were familiar to him.