Nothing is left now of this garden, or the palace to which it belonged, or the Gate of the Cannon, after which they were named. A disastrous fire and the building of the Bulgarian railway long made a waste of the tip of Seraglio Point, until in 1913 it was turned into a public park. Seraglio Point is an Italian misnomer for the Turkish _Seraï Bournou_—Palace Point. But a palace and gardens remain, not far away, and to them has been transferred the title of Top Kapou—Cannon Gate. Although this is now the oldest palace in Constantinople, the name of _Eski Seraï_—the Old Palace—belongs to the site of that older one which the Conqueror built on the hill of the War Department. He was the first, however, to set apart Seraglio Point as a pleasure-ground for his family, and he built the _Chinili-Kyöshk_, now of the Imperial Museum. His son and grandson built other pavilions of their own, but it was not until the reign of his great-grandson Süleïman I that the court was definitely transferred to the Seraglio. As in the Palace of Celestial Purity in the Forbidden City, no woman had up to that time been permitted to sleep there. And it is perhaps significant that the decadence of the empire began very soon after the transfer of the harem to the new palace. From that time on the Old Palace, whose grounds Süleïman greatly curtailed to make room for his two principal mosques, was reserved for the families of deceased sultans, while the new palace was continually enlarged and beautified. Something legendary attaches to it in the eyes of the common people, who are pleasantly inclined to confuse King Solomon, the friend of the Queen of Sheba, and a great personage in Mohammedan folklore, with their own Sultan Süleïman. A soldier from Asia Minor related to me once how Sultan Solomon sent out four birds to the four quarters of heaven to discover the most perfect site for a palace, and how they came back with the news that no place was to be found in the world so airy or so beautiful as Seraglio Point. He accordingly built the palace of Top Kapou. And beneath it he hollowed out a space reaching far under the sea in which he planted a forest of marble pillars. I cannot vouch for the last part of the story, but I am inclined to agree with the Sultan’s birds. Certainly the garden of the Seraglio has its superb situation between the Golden Horn and the Marmora, its crescent panorama of cities, seas, and islands, and its mementoes of the past, to put it alone among the gardens of the world. Acropolis of ancient Byzantium, pleasance of Roman, Greek, and Ottoman emperors for sixteen hundred years, it is more haunted by associations than any other garden in Europe. One could make a library alone of the precious things its triple walls enclose: the column of Claudius Gothicus, the oldest Roman monument in the city; the church of St. Irene, originally built by Constantine, whose mosaics look down as Justinian and Leo left them on the keys of conquered cities, the