in case their _kîsmet_ should suddenly require them to make their own living. One chamber had more the air of a bedroom than any other. For the Sultan rarely slept two nights in succession in the same place, or undressed to do so. On a table were two of the bullet-proof waistcoats he wore at _Selamlîk_. A handsome case of arms stood by the door. High on the walls hung some crude pictures which he perhaps painted himself. He was fond of playing with the brush. A canvas somewhere else represented a boat full of priests, standing, to whom a group of plump pink sirens beckoned from an arsenic shore. The officer in charge told us that the faces of the priests were those of Midhat Pasha and other reformers. With all their oddity, the rooms had a familiar air of habitation. Things of use and of ornament were where Abd ül Hamid dropped them the night he was taken away. Writing materials were strewn on the desks. A photograph of the German imperial family looked out of a gold frame set in brilliants. In a corner stood a table, a chair, and a footstool, all with crystal legs, where the Sultan sat in thunder-storms. The whole palace was full of small human touches of the suspicious, ignorant, lonely old man who lived there. And East and West were strangely jumbled in his well-worn furniture, as they were in his ancient empire—as they were in the visitors inquisitively trampling the carpets and fingering the belongings of the fallen master of the house. The harem, by a characteristic piece of Oriental reserve, was not opened even by its despoilers to the gaze of the profane. But we were allowed to go into the harem garden, overlooked by the Sultan’s lattices. An artificial canal wound through the middle of it. Row-boats, a motor-boat, even a small sailboat, were moored there. Under the trees stood a miniature replica of the fountain at Gyök Sou. Pigeons fluttered everywhere and water-fowl were playing in the canal, while against the wall cutting off the immense prospect the garden might have enjoyed stood cages of gaudy birds. At one spot only did a small kiosk, execrably furnished, give access to the view. Through the telescope on the upper floor Abd ül Hamid used to watch the city he dared not enter. We also saw a little theatre that communicated by a bridge with the harem. In this bonbon box of red velvet the singers and variety actors visiting the city used to be invited to perform—sometimes before a solitary spectator. King Otto of Bavaria would have found no kinship with him, though. On the wall a photograph of Arturo Stravolo, an Italian transformationist, hung beside a large and bad portrait of Verdi.