The creator of this masterpiece was that great friend of the arts Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha, to whose _medresseh_ in Stamboul I have already referred. His _yalî_ has disappeared and his legendary pleasure-grounds are now a wilderness, albeit superlatively pleasant still either to look into or to look out of. In them is one of the sixteen famous springs of Hafid Effendi. Historic garden-parties were given in this garden, and ambassadors whom sultans delighted to honour were taken to sit in the golden room. It used to be a detached kiosk in Hüsseïn Pasha’s garden. In modern times a house has been added to it, and a retired provincial governor has inherited the fallen splendour of the Kyöprülüs. Some day, I suppose, it will all go up in smoke or tumble into the Bosphorus. In the meantime the fountain is still, the precious marquetry has been picked out of the doors, the woodwork cracks and sags, the blue jars and the flowers become more and more ghostly, the gold of the ceiling grows dimmer every day. But even so, the golden room has a charm that it can never have had when the afternoon sun first shimmered into it. * * * * * The gardens of the lower Bosphorus are in many ways less picturesque than those nearer the Black Sea. The hills on which they lie are in general lower, farther apart, and more thickly covered with houses. With their milder air, however, their more Mediterranean light, and their glimpse into the Sea of Marmora, they enjoy another, a supreme, advantage. The upper Bosphorus—well, in other places you may see sharply rising slopes terraced or wooded. Beside the Nordfjord, the coast of Dalmatia, or Lake Como, where would the Bosphorus be? But nowhere else may you behold the silhouette of Stamboul. And that, pricking the sky above its busy harbour, just not closing the wide perspective that shines away to the south, is the unparalleled ornament of the gardens of the lower Bosphorus. The garden that Melling laid out for the princess Hadijeh was in this part of the strait, at the point of Defterdar Bournou, above Orta-kyöi. Abd ül Hamid, who to his other crimes added a culpable crudity of taste, pulled down the princess’s charming old house in order to build two hideous new ones for two daughters of his own. Most of the finest sites in the neighbourhood, or on the opposite shore, belong or have belonged to different members of the imperial family. Abd ül Hamid himself was brought back from Salonica at the outbreak of the Balkan War and shut up in the Asiatic garden of Beïlerbeï. In this old pleasance of the sultans Abd ül Aziz built a palace for the empress Eugénie when she went to the East to open the Suez Canal. It must have been strange to Abd ül Hamid to look out from its windows at the opposite park where he reigned for thirty-three years. The city of palaces which grew up around him there was never known otherwise than as Yîldîz Kiosk—the Pavilion of the Star—from a _kyöshk_ his father built.