Along the walls facing Skutari rose the new palace of Sultan Mahmûd, opening out on the water by a great door of gilded copper. Near Seraglio Point stood the summer harem, a vast semicircular building, designed to accommodate five hundred women, with its great courtyards and magnificent baths and gardens--the scene of those ingenious illuminations which under the name of “_tulip festivals_” became so famous. Beyond the walls, opposite the harem and just above the shore, was placed the celebrated Seraglio Battery, consisting of twenty guns of different designs and covered with sculptures and inscriptions: each of these was captured on some battlefield and from Christian armies in the course of the earlier European wars. The walls were furnished with eight gates, three of them on the city side and five facing toward the sea. Great marble terraces extended from the walls along the banks, and subterranean passage-ways leading from the royal palace to the gates on the Sea of Marmora offered a means of escape to the sultans, who could thus take ship for Skutari or Topkhâneh in case they were besieged from the land. Nor yet was this all of the Seraglio. Near the outer walls and all along the sides of the hills there arose numberless other kiosks, built to imitate little mosques or forts or tunnels, each one of which communicated by a narrow footway, concealed behind lofty screens of foliage, with the smaller gates of the third court. There was the Yali Kiosk, now destroyed, which was reflected in the waters of the Golden Horn; there stands to-day, almost intact, the New Kiosk, a little royal residence in itself, circular and covered with gilt ornaments and paintings, to which the sultans used to repair at sunset to feast their eyes upon the spectacle of the thousand ships riding at anchor in the port. Near the summer harem stood the Looking-glass Kiosk, where the treaty of peace by which Turkey ceded the Crimea to Russia was signed in 1784, and the kiosk of Hassan Pasha, all resplendent with gilding, its walls covered with mirrors which threw back fantastic reflections of the fêtes and nocturnal orgies of the sultans. The Cannon Kiosk, out of whose windows bodies were thrown into the Sea of Marmora, stood hard by the battery on Cape Seraglio. The Kiosk of the Sea, where the validéh of Muhammad IV. held her secret councils, overhung the spot where the waters of the Bosphorus mingle with those of the Sea of Marmora. The Kiosk of Roses looks out upon the esplanade where the pages were exercised, and it was here that in 1839 the new constitution of the empire, embodied in the Hatti Sherif of Gül-Khâneh, was signed. Some of the kiosks on the other side of the Seraglio which are still standing are the Review Kiosk, from which, himself unseen, the Sultan could watch all who passed by to the Divân; the Alai Kiosk, at that angle of the walls near St. Sophia whence Muhammad IV. flung to his mutinous soldiers his favorite Meleki, together with twenty-nine