Such fancies as these kept crowding through my mind as I wandered about that famous spot, raising my eyes from time to time to the grated windows of one or another of those kiosks, now as mournful and neglected-looking as sepulchres. And yet, notwithstanding all the horrible associations of the place, one is conscious of a thrill of delicious excitement, a throbbing of the pulses, a languid, voluptuous, half-melancholy sense of pleasure, at the thought of all the youth and beauty and loveliness which once had its being here. These little stairways, up and down which I pass, once felt the pressure of their flying feet; these shady alleys, through which I walk, have heard the soft rustle of their garments; the roofs of these little porticoes, against whose pillars I brush in passing, have echoed the sound of their infantile laughter. It seems as though some actual token of their presence must still linger within those walls, hover in the very air, and I long to search for it, to cry aloud those famous names, one after another, over and over again, when surely some voice, faint, distant, ghostly, will reward my efforts, some shadowy white-robed figure flit across a lofty terrace or appear for a moment at the end of a dim, leafy vista. What would I not have given, as I scanned each barred door and grated window, to have known behind which of them the widow of Alexius Comnenus was confined--the most beautiful of all the fair Lesbos prisoners, as well as the most fascinating Grecian of her time--or where the beloved daughter of Errizo, governor of Negropont, had been stabbed for preferring death to the brutal caresses of Muhammad II.! And Khurrem, Suleiman’s favorite, at what window did she linger, graceful, languid, her great black eyes fixed upon the Sea of Marmora beneath their veil of silken lashes? How often must this very path have felt the light pressure of that fascinating Hungarian dancer’s feet who effaced the image of Saffié from the heart of Murad III., slipping like a blade of steel between the imperial arms! Above this flowery bank must Kesem, that beautiful Grecian and jealous fury who beheld the reigns of seven sultans, have bent her pale proud face to pluck a flower in passing. And that gigantic Armenian who drove Ibrahim insane for love of her, has she not plunged her great white arms into the cool depths of this very fountain? And whose feet were the smaller? The fourth Muhammad’s “_little favorite_,” two of whose slippers together did not measure the length of a stiletto, or Rebia Gulnuz, “_she who drank of the roses of spring_”? And who had the prettiest blue eyes in the Archipelago? And whose foot left no trace on the white sand of the garden-walk? Was the hair of Marhfiruz, “_the favorite of the stars of the night_,” thicker and more golden than that of Miliklia, the youthful Russian odalisque, who kept the ferocity of the second Osman in check? And those Persian and Arabian children who