lulled Ibrahim to sleep with their fairy-tales, and the forty maidens who drank the third Murad’s blood, is there nothing left of them all--not so much as a tress of hair, a thread from a single veil, an imprint on the walls? For answer I saw a strange, weird vision far off where the great trees grew thickest. Beneath the long shadowy arcades I beheld a mournful procession: one after the other, in ghostly, never-ending succession, they filed by--validéh sultans, sisters of pâdishahs, _kadyns_, odalisques, slaves, children hardly arrived at womanhood, middle-aged, old and white-haired, timid young maidens, faces contorted with savage jealousy, rulers of an empire, favorites of a single day, playthings of an hour, representatives of ten generations and a hundred peoples--leading their children by the hand or clasping them convulsively to their breasts. Around this one’s neck the noose is still hanging; from that one’s heart sticks a dagger-hilt; the salt waters of the Sea of Marmora drip from another’s clothes. Brilliant with jewels, covered with dagger-thrusts, their faces contorted from the action of poison or the long-drawn-out agonies of the Old Seraglio, on they came, an interminable, mute, but eloquent procession, fading away one after another in the gloom of the cypress trees, leaving behind them a trail of faded flowers, of tears, and of drops of blood, which swept over my heart in a great wave of indescribable horror and pity. Beyond the third enclosure there extends a long level stretch of ground covered with a luxuriant vegetation and dotted over with pretty little buildings, in the midst of which rises the so-called Column of Theodosius, of gray granite, surmounted by a beautiful Corinthian capital and supported upon a large pedestal, on one side of which may still be traced the last two words of a Latin inscription which ran as follows: “_Fortunæ reduci ob devictos Gothos_.” Here the elevated plain upon which stands the great central rectangle of the Seraglio buildings comes to an end; beyond, as far as Seraglio Point, and covering the entire space between the walls of the three courts and the outer boundary-walls, rose a great forest of plane trees, cypresses, pines, laurels, and terebinths, all along the hillsides, and poplars draped with vines and creepers, shading a succession of gardens filled with roses and heliotropes, and laid out in the form of terraces, from which wide flights of marble stairs led down to the shore.