A _medresseh_ is a theological school and law school combined, since in Islam the teachings of the Prophet, as embodied in the Koran and the traditions, form not only the rule of life but the law of the land. It is only recently that a difference has been recognised between the _Sheriat_ or sacred law and the civil law, but their boundaries are still indistinct, and for many men the same door leads to legal or to spiritual preferment. I have said so much about tombs and tiles and other matters that I have left myself no room to speak of _medressehs_—or schools of other kinds, or libraries, or caravansaries, or baths, or hospitals, or soup-kitchens, or any other of the charitable institutions that cluster around a mosque yard. We are wont to imagine that philanthropy was invented in the West, and that the institutional church is a peculiarly modern development. But before America was discovered institutional mosques flourished in Stamboul and all over Asia Minor, and continue to do so to this day. Almost no mosque, indeed, has not some philanthropy connected with it. They are administered, mosques and dependencies and all, by a separate and very important department of government called the Ministry of the _Erkaf_—of Pious Foundations. [Illustration: The court of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha] [Illustration: Doorway in the _medresseh_ of Feïzoullah Effendi] [Illustration: The interior of Sokollî Mehmed Pasha] The necessities of space do not always allow these dependencies to gather around their central mosque yard. Or sometimes they are independent foundations and may have a yard of their own of which a small mosque is merely one feature. Two very interesting examples are _medressehs_ in the vicinity of the mosque of the Conqueror. They both belong to the same period and their founders were both ministers of Sultan Moustafa II, who was dethroned in 1703. The smaller and more ruinous was built by Feïzoullah Effendi, _Sheï’h ül Islam_, a mighty man of God who did and undid viziers in his day and perished miserably at Adrianople in the upheaval that drove his imperial master from the throne. His _medresseh_ nearly perished too, in 1912, to make way for a new boulevard. But it was happily saved by the society of the Friends of Stamboul, and in time its little cloister may become less of a jungle. Its chief ornament is the structure to the left of the gateway, where a flight of steps mounts under a wonderful arch or crocket of perforated marble to a pillared porch with a mosque on one side and a library on the other. The mosque is the more dilapidated, but it contains fragments of good tiling and a charming little door. The library has the same little door, shallow-arched and ornamented with fine stalactites of marble. The interior of the library is almost filled by a square cage, which has a corresponding door of its own and a dark inner compartment. On the wired shelves of this structure big books are piled on their sides, and their