Another pavilion in that park, also visible from Beïlerbeï, is the Malta Kiosk, where Abd ül Hamid’s older brother Mourad passed the first months of his long captivity, and where Midhat Pasha, father of the Turkish constitution, was iniquitously tried for the murder of Abd ül Aziz. In the pleasant lower hall of this little palace, almost filled by a marble basin of goldfish, it is not easy to reconstitute that drama so fateful for Turkey—which did not end when Abd ül Hamid received from Arabia, in a box labelled “Old Japanese Ivory,” the head of the murdered patriot. The park of Yîldîz originally belonged to the palace whose name of Chira’an—The Torches—has been corrupted by Europeans into Cheragan. Only a ruin stands there now, on which Abd ül Aziz once squandered half the revenues of the empire. He stumbled on the threshold the first time he went into his new house, and never would live in it; but after his dethronement he either committed suicide or was murdered there. His successor, Mourad V, dethroned in turn after a reign of three months, lived in his unhappy uncle’s palace for nearly thirty years. Abd ül Hamid is said to have kept his brother so rigorously that the ladies of the family were at one time compelled to dress in the curtains of the palace. The so-called mad Sultan, deprived of books and even of writing materials, taught his children to read and write by means of charcoal on the parquet floor. The imperial prisoner occupied the central rooms of the palace, the doors leading from which were nailed up. When architects were called after his death to put the palace in order they found a foot of water standing on the marble floor of the state entrance, at the north end; and street dogs, jumping in and out of the broken windows, lived in the magnificent throne-room above. Upon his own dethronement, Abd ül Hamid begged to be allowed to retire to this splendid residence. It was presented, instead, to the nation by Sultan Mehmed V for a parliament house. But after two months of occupancy as such it was destroyed by fire. It was only the last of many palaces, one of which was built by Selim III and in which Melling, again, had a hand. The name Chira’an goes back, I believe, to the time of Ahmed III, whose Grand Vizier and son-in-law, Ibrahim Pasha, had a palace there. This minister, by some reports a renegade Armenian, is famous in Turkish annals for his liberal administration, for his many public buildings, and for his introduction of printing into the Ottoman Empire. Among his other talents was one for humouring the tastes of his splendour-loving master. Ibrahim Pasha gave the Sultan one night at Chira’an a garden-party, at which countless tortoises, with lights fastened to their shells, made a moving illumination among the trees. Whence the name of The Torches.