pressing thousands in their frenzy to see the monarch whom they had shorn of his power. Then, surrounded by the glitter of the princes and his aides, preceded and followed by the scarlet flutter of the lancers’ banderoles, the Caliph of Islam flashed away toward the column of Constantine. XV THE CAPTURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE 1909 What could be more aggravating to a greedy impressionist than to have sat nearly two years in Constantinople, to have watched the amicable revolution of 1908, to have been one of a privileged few to assist at the reopening by Abd ül Hamid of the parliament he suppressed thirty-two years ago, and then to have been caught in an ignoble Florentine pension, among ladies passionate after pictures, when the mutiny of April 13 broke out in Stamboul? And nothing, from the meagre Italian telegrams, was more difficult to make out than the origin of that mutiny. Had the Committee of Union and Progress made the mistakes their friends had feared? Had the opposition liberals been unconsciously playing into the hands of reactionaries? Had the Sultan, who appeared to swallow the revolution in so lamblike a manner, merely been lying low? The only thing was to go back and find out, and to get what reparation one could by seeing the end of the affair—if end there were. For it must be recorded against the sagacity of impressionists, or of one particular impressionist, that he thought nothing at all might happen. The first hint of anything to the contrary came from a _Neue Freie Presse_, obtained at a Croatian railway-station, which announced that by the 19th a Macedonian army would concentrate at Chatalja, some twenty-five miles from Constantinople. The 19th was the next day, and I was due in Stamboul on the morning of the 20th. There might, then, be sights to see on the way. I had a further hint of them after getting into the Constantinople sleeper that night at Belgrade. Two men were already in bed in the compartment, and before morning I became conscious of the porter telling one of them in Turkish that he must change for Salonica in twenty minutes. I told myself that he must be a Young Turk hurrying back from Europe to take part in—what? I had the strangest sense, as we whistled through the dark toward Nisch, of forces gathering silently for an impending drama.