There may be question as to whether any real generous impulse, any true glimmer of repentance, visited that old lion at bay. But there can be none as to the temper of the crowds that marched about the streets for days with flags and music, cheering the army that had freed them, cheering the Sultan who, they said, had been kept from them by traitors, cheering the orators who told them again and again of their happiness and assured them that thenceforward in the Ottoman Empire there was no distinction between Armenian, Greek, Jew, and Turk: all were Ottomans, all were brothers, all were free. It was, of course, too good to be true. Yet, even in the light of subsequent history, I persist in remembering those days as a little golden age which no one was the worse for having known. A carriage wheel was crushed in the press. The hat—or should one say the fez?—was instantly passed around, and the happy jehu was given the wherewithal to buy fifty new wheels. A shop-window, again, was accidentally broken. The shopkeeper presently had reason to wish that the crowd would break a window every day. Ladies who never before would have dared go alone through certain streets, or through any street at certain hours, went unmolested when and where they chose. Races that had lived under an armed truce, and not always that, suddenly fell on each other’s necks. A cold-hearted impressionist more than once found it in him to smile at respectable old gentlemen who insisted on kissing fervent young orators on both cheeks. And when priests of different religions exchanged such salutes it was even more a case of the lion lying down with the lamb. [Illustration: Cartoon representing the exodus of the Palace camarilla]