During the days and nights of flags and illuminations that followed there were other sights to see. One of them was the _Selamlîk_ of the ensuing Friday. It took place at St. Sophia, whither Mehmed II rode to pray after his conquest of Constantinople, and where popular opinion willed that a later Mehmed, after this memorable recapture of the town, should make his first public prayer. About this ceremony was none of the pomp that distinguished the one I had witnessed the week before. A few Macedonian Blues were drawn up by the mosque, a few Macedonian cavalrymen guarded the gates of the Seraglio, and they were not all in place by the time the Sultan, in a new khaki uniform, drove slowly through the grounds of that ancient enclosure. Again, on the succeeding Monday, we beheld the grisly spectacle of those who fomented the mutiny among the soldiers, and who, in long white shirts, with statements of their names and deeds pinned to their bosoms, swung publicly from great tripods at the scene of their several crimes—three at the Stamboul end of the Bridge, five in front of Parliament, and five in the square of the War Department. And the new Sultan was once more the centre of interest on the day he was girded with the sword of Osman. He went to the sacred mosque of Eyoub with little of the pageantry that used to celebrate that solemn investiture—in a steam-launch, distinguishable from other steam-launches only by a big magenta silk flag bearing the imperial _toughra_. From Eyoub he drove round the walls to the Adrianople Gate, and then through the city to the Seraglio. His gala coach, his scarlet-and-gold coachman, his four chestnut horses, his blue-and-silver outriders, and his prancing lancers were the most glittering part of that long procession. The most Oriental part of it was the train of carriages bearing the religious heads of the empire, white-bearded survivors of another time, in venerable turbans and green robes embroidered with gold. But the most significant group in the procession was that of the trim staff of the Macedonian army, on horseback, headed by Mahmoud Shefket Pasha. Not least notable among the conquerors of Constantinople will be this grizzled, pale, thin, keen, kind-looking Arab who, a month before that day, was an unknown corps commander in Salonica. His destiny willed that hardly more than four years after that day he should even more suddenly go again into the unknown. His fate was a happy one in that it overtook him at the height of power a Turkish subject may attain, when he was at once Field-Marshal, Minister of War, and Grand Vizier, and that it left in suspense the colder judgment of his time with regard to the actual degree of his greatness. Legends and hatreds naturally gathered around such a man. I do not know whether it was true that he took the city before he was ready, with barely fifteen thousand men, on a sudden night warning that the desperate Sultan plotted a massacre for the next day.