Returning to Scutari long afterward, it came upon me with a certain surprise that no one offered me sweets or flowers, or even a glass of water. My case was oddly put to me by a man like one of Shakespeare’s fools, who perhaps should not have been at large but who asked himself aloud when he met me at a mosque gate: “I wonder what he is looking for—his country?” If Scutari tempts me to do Kenneth Grahame over again, it also tempts me to do Dr. Hale over again, to whose famous hero I could give other points than that of the election board in Hell’s Kitchen. The enduring taunt of my school-days was that I never could be President, and it was a bitter blow to me when I learned that my name could never be carved in the Hall of Fame above the Hudson. Yet when I went back to Scutari, as a man will go back to the home of his youth, the inhabitants were so far from recognising me as one of themselves that the thought occurred to me how amusingly like life it would be if I, who am not notable for the orthodoxy of my opinions, were massacred for a Christian in the town where I was born! Nevertheless I have discovered with a good deal of surprise, in the room of the vanished Scutari I used to know, a Scutari that I never saw or heard of when I was young—I speak, of course, to the race of men that likes Stamboul—a place of boundless resources, of priceless possibilities—a true City of Gold. * * * * * The favourite story is that Chrysopolis was so called because of the Persian satraps who once lived there and heaped up the gold of tribute. Others have it, and I like their theory better, that the city took its name from Chryses, son of Chryseis and Agamemnon, who, fleeing after the fall of Troy from Ægisthus and Clytemnestra, met there his end. A few poetic-minded individuals have found an origin for the word in the appearance the town presents from Constantinople at sunset with all its panes on fire. I don’t know that the idea is more far-fetched than any other. An equal variety of opinion prevails with regard to the modern name. Certain authorities claim that it is a corruption of Üsküdar, used by the Turks, which is from a Persian word meaning a post messenger. For myself, I am feebly impressed by all these Persians, who seem to me dragged in by the ears. A Turkish savant told me once that he believed Üsküdar to be a corruption of an old Armenian name, Oskitar or Voskitar, which is merely a translation of Chrysopolis. When Mehmed II captured Constantinople he brought a great many Armenians into it, to repopulate the city and to offset the Greeks; and the richest of them, who came from Broussa, he settled in Scutari, which has always retained a certain Armenian tinge. I learn that in ancient Armenian some such word could have been made out of Chrysopolis. But the name Scutari is much older than the Turkish conquest. Villehardouin and at least one Byzantine