Beïkos and the shores of its great bay were a favourite resort of sultans long before the day of Mehmed Ali. In general, however, the Turks have always preferred the narrow middle stretch of the Bosphorus; and for most reasons I am with them. The summer _meltem_—which some derive from the Italian _maltempo_—often intensely irritating near the mouth of the Black Sea, is here somewhat tempered by the windings of the strait. Then here the coasts of the two continents approach each other most closely, are most gracefully modelled and greenly wooded. The Asiatic shore in particular, which opposite Therapia is forbidding enough, is here a land of enchantment, with its gardens, its groves, its happy valleys, its tempting points and bays, its sky-line of cypresses and stone-pines, its weathered wooden villages, its ruined waterside castle of Anadolou Hissar, its far-famed Sweet Waters—and most so if seen from Europe in a light of sunset or early morning. If Mehmed Ali lost his palace at Beïkos—and on Arnaout-kyöi Point there are the ruins of another one which he was stopped from building—several of the most enviable estates along this part of the Bosphorus belong to his descendants. The beautiful wooded cape of Chibouklou, on the Asiatic side, is crowned by the mauresque château of the present Khedive. Directly opposite, on the southern point of Stenia Bay, is the immense old tumble-down wooden palace of his grandfather Ismaïl, the spendthrift Khedive of the Suez Canal, who died there in exile. The garden behind it is the largest and, historically, one of the most interesting on the Bosphorus. The name of the bay is derived, according to one story, from that of the Temple of Sosthenia, or Safety, built by the Argonauts after their escape from King Amycus. A temple of Hecate was also known there in more authentic times, and a church dedicated to the Archangel Michael by Constantine the Great. On a stormy night of 1352, the admirals Nicolò Pisani of Venice and Paganino Doria of Genoa unwittingly took shelter in the bay within bow-shot of each other, during an interval of a long sea-fight which raged between them the whole length of the Bosphorus. Emirgyan, the name of the village in which the khedivial estate is situated, was that of a Persian general who surrendered Erivan to Sultan Mourad IV in 1635, and who ended his days in pleasant captivity on this wooded shore. His beautiful Persian palace of Feridoun was the wonder of its day. His conqueror used often to visit him there, for Emirgyan was a man of wit and an accomplished musician. Not only did he first introduce into Turkey a sort of Persian bassoon and the four-stringed Persian _chartar_ from which we get our guitar, but he marked a new epoch in Turkish music. There were also other reasons why Mourad used to visit the palace of Feridoun, where, “in the design of refreshing his vital spirits and of summoning the warmth which awakens joy, it pleased” the Sultan “to give