from the edge of the Marmora, is almost the last vestige of the palace whose legendary splendour filled so many mediæval pages. On the slope behind it the fires to which I have referred laid bare several Byzantine terraces, the entrances to a number of vaulted substructures, and a tower which had been incorporated into the surrounding houses. Might it be, perhaps, the tower of the Great Admiral Apocaucus, which he built as a prison for John Cantacuzene but in which he himself was murdered in 1345? I am not the one to say. But that Palatine Hill, so long the centre of the world, where so much has been enacted that is most coloured and passionate of life, and which now looks so quietly at its quiet sea—and there is a blue keeps no trace of all the keels that have scarred it from the time of the Argonauts!—that Palatine Hill has an immense attraction for me. And I marvel that no one has yet taken advantage of its present accessibility to learn precisely what, after so many fires and earthquakes and other spoilers, may be left of its old arrangement. [Illustration: The House of Justinian] A Palatine Hill which might reveal more dominates the opposite end of the city. This ridge above the Golden Horn is the site of the palace whose name of Blacherne—or Vlaherni as I should be tempted to write it if I were not afraid of my friends the Byzantinists—seems to have been derived from that of some barbarian settler. Was he haply a Wallachian? He settled, at all events, on this hilltop in pre-Constantinian days, and outside the line of the Constantinian, or even of the Theodosian, walls. It was only in the seventh century that the emperor Heraclius threw a wall outside the quarter. Which emperor first built a palace there is not known, but Anastasius I enlarged one as early as the fifth century. In 457 the pious Pulcheria, the virgin empress of Marcian, founded the celebrated shrine of the Madonna of Blacherne. Restored and enlarged in different reigns, it was the object of several of those annual imperial pilgrimages which played so large a part in the life of the ancient city. There was even a day in the year when the emperors bathed in the Holy Well of the church. This _áyazma_ may still be seen in the waterside quarter of Balat. The name Balat is a Turkish corruption of the Greek word for palace, and Aïvan Seraï, as the adjoining quarter is called, means the Palace of the Balcony. These names are another reminder of the palace that figures so often in the chronicles of the crusades. Of the palace itself more remains than of the Great Palace, though it still waits for a Labarte or an Ebersolt. Bits of masonry crop out of the ground or stand visibly among the houses all the way up the hill. Indeed, I suspect that a good deal of the hill itself is artificial. Such, at least, is the case of the high terrace bordering the city wall where the mosque of Aïvas Effendi faces two ivy-mantled towers. An