The silence was suddenly broken by the voice of the Sultan’s secretary, who began to read, beside the steps of the tribune, the speech from the throne. My Turkish is too small and too colloquial to take in much of so high-flown a document, but I caught references to the perfidy of Austria and Bulgaria and to the author’s satisfaction in being able to open again the assembly for which thirty years ago the country had not been ripe. Twice the house broke into applause, which the Sultan acknowledged with a military salute. At the close of the reading a green-robed _mollah_ offered prayer. The majority of those present listened to it, as Moslems do, in an attitude very much like that of the Greek _adorante_ in Berlin, except that the hands are held lower and closer to the body. When the prayer came to an end, with a fervent responsive _amin_, the Sultan did a thing that no one had expected. He made a brief speech. But the signal had already been given, according to programme, for bands and cannon to announce the inauguration of the new era. The consequence was that few heard even the sound of his majesty’s voice. In a moment more he was gone. The entire ceremony, during which all remained on their feet, lasted less than half an hour. When it was over, those who had lost the spectacle of the Sultan’s arrival made haste to secure places whence they might witness that of his departure. The view from the windows of the parliament house was one never to forget—for its own picturesqueness, for its historic significance, for its evocations of the unconquerable vitality, of the dramatic contrasts and indifferences of life. The sun was in gala mood that day, to match the mood and to bring out the predominatingly Asiatic colour of the thousands that packed the square which had been the Forum Augustæum of New Rome. Not only did they pack the square, those Asiatic thousands, and every radiating open space as far as the eye could reach; they loaded its bare trees, they filled the windows and lined the roofs overlooking it, they darkened the buttresses, the cupolas, the minaret galleries of St. Sophia. Two men even clung to the standard of the crescent at the apex of the great dome. The brown _chasseurs_ of Salonica, in recognition of the part they played in the revolution, were given the honour of keeping open a narrow lane through the middle of the square. They were assisted by tall blue Anatolians of the imperial guard and by deputations with flags and inscribed banners. A gilded barouche drove into the courtyard where once had stood the Roman senate. A scarlet-and-gold coachman drove the four superb iron-grey horses, and in front of them pranced a fifth iron-grey mounted by a blue-and-silver outrider. Three buglers in black and scarlet faced the porte-cochère. At the sound of their bugles the soldiers presented arms and a band burst into the imperial march. The thin blue and brown fringe of guards undulated with the eddies of motion that surged through the