There are three lines of fortifications, forming as it were three gigantic ruined steps. The inner one, which is the highest, is strengthened at short regular intervals by massive square towers; that in the middle by round ones; the outer wall, much lower than the others, is protected by a deep, wide moat, formerly filled with water drawn from the Golden Horn and Sea of Marmora, and now choked with grass and shrubbery. These walls, as we see them now, are almost precisely as they were the day after the conquest of Constantinople. The restorations made by Muhammad and Bayezid II. amount to very little. There can be still seen the breaches made by Orbano’s powerful guns, the marks left by the catapults and battering-rams, the great rents where mines were fired, and all the various indications which mark those spots where the attack was most furious, the defence most desperate. Almost all the round towers of the middle wall are ruined from base to summit, and while those of the inner wall are most of them still standing, they are broken at the corners, dismantled, dwindling off to points at the top, like huge tree-trunks sharpened at the end with blows from some giant axe, or else cracked from top to bottom or hollowed out at the base like cliffs worn by the sea-waves. Great masses of masonry detached from the curtains have rolled down upon the platforms of the middle and outer walls and choke up the moat. Little footpaths wind in and out amid the heaps of stones and thick underbrush, lost to view in the deep shadows of the overhanging vegetation between huge stones and bare patches of earth torn up by the falling of some heavy mass. Each portion of walls between any two towers comprises in itself a complete and wonderful example of ruins and of vegetation, full of power and majesty, wild, colossal, forbidding, and adorned with a melancholy and imposing beauty which impels a feeling of reverence. One seems to be looking at the ruins of an endless chain of feudal castles, or of one of those mighty girdles of wall which encircled the fabulous empires of Eastern Asia. Constantinople of to-day disappears, and before us rises the City of the Constantines; we breathe the air of the fifteenth century, and as our thoughts become more and more centred upon the day of her tremendous fall, we find ourselves for a few moments dazed, bewildered, and turned, as it were, to stone.