Were I a little more didactically inclined, this speech should inspire the severest reflections on the man who made it and on the ironical truth of his lightly uttered prophecy. As it is, I am more inclined to reflect on the irony of the fact that ill-gotten gains may do more good or create something nearer the immortal than the savings of honest toil. At any rate, the _medresseh_ of Shemsi Pasha is such a place as only a poet or a great architect could imagine; and many homeless people found refuge there during the late Balkan War. The cloister is very small and irregular. There are cells and a covered arcade on two sides. The third, I think, from three or four quaint little windows of perforated marble that remain in a corner of the wall, must once have been more open to the Bosphorus than it is now. On the fourth side, and taking up a good deal of the court, are the mosque and the tomb of the founder. The mosque must have been a little jewel in its day. It is half a ruin now. The minaret is gone and so is all but the pillars of the portico that looked into the court. Within, however, are intricately panelled shutters, and a little gallery painted on the under-side, and a carved _mimber_ of woodwork like that in the tombs of Roxelana and her sons. The refugees of 1912, poor wretches, saw no reason why they should not drive as many nails as they needed into that precious wood. The greatest ornament of the mosque is a magnificent bronze grille in the archway that opens into the adjoining tomb. This grille is rather like one they show you at Ravenna, in a crypt window of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, except that it has an arrow in each of the arched openings; and the surmounting lunette is a more complicated design. Did Shemsi Pasha, who seems to have had rather a genius for picking things up, get hold of a real Byzantine grille and make this perfect use of it? The tomb itself is in a piteous state of neglect. Nothing is left to show which of the three bare and broken wooden catafalques marked the grave of the dead poet. Windows in the outer wall look through a little marble portico upon a ruined quay. And, tempered so, the splash and flicker of the Bosphorus come into the mosque. [Illustration: The bassma haneh] [Illustration: Hand wood-block printing]