Powerful as the fortress was in its day, and interesting as it remains as a monument to the energy and resource of its builder, it never played a great part in the martial history of the Turks. The Bosphorus was not then the important highway it is now. After the capture of Constantinople the castle degenerated into a garrison of Janissaries and a state prison of less importance than the Seven Towers. Not a few passages of romance, however, attach to that diminished period. More than one European diplomat spent a season of repose within the walls of Cut-Throat Castle, in days when international law was less finical on such points than it since has grown. And it formed a residence less agreeable than the present country embassies, if we may judge from the account that has come down to us of one such _villeggiatura_. This was written by a young Bohemian attaché who spent two years of the sixteenth century in enforced retirement at Roumeli Hissar. His name, Wenceslas Wratislaw, with those of other prisoners, may still be seen in the stone of a little chamber high in the north tower. In the same tower, commanding a magnificent view, the Conqueror lived while preparing his great siege. Whether this, or the angular tower by the water, or some other donjon of the Bosphorus was the Black Tower which has so unsavoury a name in Turkish annals I have never quite made up my mind. To-day the castle has outlived even that period of usefulness. The true cut-throats skulk in the bare hills at the mouth of the Black Sea, while the ambassadors—with the single exception, it is true, of our own—pass their summers in pleasant villas presented to them by different Sultans. As for the towers, they survive only to add their picturesqueness to the narrowest part of the Bosphorus, to flaunt ivy and even sizable trees from their battlements, and to afford a habitation to bats and carrion-crows. The last vestige of military uses clinging to them is the pseudo-classic guard-house that crouches under the waterside keep. The walls at least subserve the purpose, however, of sheltering a quarter of our village. One of our thoroughfares enters the double gate by the north tower, descends a breakneck alley of steps lattice-bordered and hung with vine, pauses between a fountain, a ruined mosque, and a monstrous mulberry-tree, and finally emerges upon the quay by a low arch that was once the boat entrance to the sea tower. There is to a prying foreigner some inheritance of other days in the inhabitants of this hanging suburb. They are all of the ruling race and there is about them something intrenched and aloof. The very dogs seem to belong to an older, a less tolerant, dispensation. The Constantinople street dog, notwithstanding the reputation that literature has attempted to fasten upon him, is in general the mildest of God’s creatures. But the dog of Cut-Throat Castle is quite another character. He is a distinct reactionary, lifting up his