When ground was broken for the third building, on the site of a Turkish _konak_, an old man came to the American in charge and asked for a private interview. He then introduced himself as an Armenian whose ancestors had been courtiers of the last emperor Constantine. From them, he said, a tradition had been handed down in his family about the ground where the Turkish house had stood. “When you dig into the ground,” he said, “you will come to an iron door. When you open the door you will see stone steps. When you go down the steps you will come into a sort of room. Then you will find a passage leading underground in the direction of St. Sophia—and in it gold, jewels, statues, all manner of things that the emperor and his friends put there for safety during the last siege. I only ask you to give me half!” The missionary thought the Armenian mad and treated him accordingly. But the old man spent all his time watching the work. And one day the diggers uncovered a metal door lying horizontally in the earth. With some difficulty they succeeded in jacking the door off the masonry in which the hinges were embedded, and underneath steps appeared, going down into a black void. At that the missionary began to be interested. When the workmen were out of the way he went down with the Armenian to explore. They descended into the subterranean vault they expected. It was held up by marble pillars with crosses on the capitals. But when they came to look for the passage they discovered that one end of the vault, the end toward St. Sophia, had been cut off by a wall of more recent date. That wall, as it happens, belongs to the great building known as the Valideh Han, erected by the famous _valideh soultan_ Kyössem. After her death were found, among other property of hers stored there, twenty chests of ducats. And when I read about them I could not help wondering whether any of those ducats came from the passage which the sultana’s workmen must accidentally have struck into in the seventeenth century.