I could easily lose myself in reminiscences of one or two Scutari gardens. In fact, I can only save myself—and the reader—from such a fate by making up my mind to write a separate chapter about gardens in general. As for the houses that went with the gardens, they were very much like the old houses of Stamboul. They were all halls and windows, and they had enormously high ceilings, so that in winter they were about as cosy as the street. I remember one of them with pleasure by reason of the frescoes that adorned it, with beautiful deer in them and birds as big as the deer stalking horizontally up the trunks of trees. Another was a vast tumble-down wooden palace of which we humbly camped out in one corner. It had originally belonged to an Armenian grandee who rejoiced in the name of the Son of the Man Who Was Cooked. The Son of the Man Who Was Cooked had the honour to be a friend of the Sultan of his day, who not seldom visited him. His majesty used to come at all hours, it is said, and sometimes in disguise. This was partly because the Son of the Man Who Was Cooked loved to go loaded with jewels, as the legend went, and the Sultan hoped by finding him in that case to have the better ground for raising loans. But it is also whispered that other reasons entered into the matter, and that on the men’s side of the house a secret stair was built, enabling majesty to circulate in the house without attracting too much attention. Certain it is that such a stair, black and breakneck, existed, for my room was at the top of it—and as I lay in bed in winter I could look out through the cracks in the wall and see the snow in the garden. But I never wondered then, as I have wondered since, whether the legend that Abd ül Hamid was half an Armenian had any connection with our house. Another of its attractions was that it boasted in the cellar a bottomless pit—or so the servants used to assure us.