the besiegers draw off, while a wild cry of victory mingled with solemn chants of thanksgiving is heard from the city’s walls. From the height facing the San Romano Gate, Muhammad II. has followed the battle’s course surrounded by his fourteen thousand Janissaries, and now for a moment he seems in doubt whether to continue the assault or abandon the undertaking altogether; but, turning his glance upon that throng of eager upturned faces, those ranks of sinewy giants, whose mighty frames are trembling with fierce and wrathful impatience, only awaiting the word to throw themselves furiously into the breach, his mind is made up, and, rising in his stirrups with a gesture of haughty disdain, he once more raises the battle-cry. Then is the vengeance of the Almighty let loose upon that doomed city. The fourteen thousand, responding with one terrible cry as from a single throat, sweep forward; throngs of dervishes speed in all directions, threatening and collecting the scattered forces; sciaus beat back the fugitives; the pashas again form their men in line; and the Sultan, brandishing his iron mace and surrounded by a cloud of flashing cimeters and drawn bows, a sea of turbans and helmets, dashes forward to take the field in person. From the San Romano Gate there pours a fresh shower of missiles; Gustinian is wounded and drops; the Italians fall back discouraged; a gigantic Janissary, Hassan d’Olubad, is the first to scale the walls; Constantine, fighting amid the remnant of his Morean heroes, is thrown from the battlements, fights on below outside the gate, until at last, overpowered by numbers, he sinks among the heaps of the slain. And with him falls the Empire of the East. Tradition says that a mighty tree marks the spot where the emperor’s body was found, but I failed to discover any trace of it. Between the huge blocks of stone, where streams of blood once flowed, the ground is all white with marguerites, and clouds of butterflies hover above. Plucking a flower by way of remembrance, to the great bewilderment of the watching gypsies, I resumed my walk. Before me the walls still stretched away into the distance as far as the eye could reach, completely hiding the city at those points where the ground rose, so that one would never have dreamed that just beyond those deserted ruins there could be a great metropolis, crowned with mighty buildings and inhabited by a teeming population; in the hollows, however, above the battlements, points of minarets flashed in the light, and the summits of cupolas, roofs of Greek churches, and tops of cypress trees stood out against the sky, while here and there, through a gap, fleeting views of the city would be obtained, as through a door hastily opened and closed again--groups of houses seemingly abandoned, deserted villages, kitchen-gardens, pleasure-grounds, and still farther away the fantastic outlines of Stambul palpitating in the white heat of the mid-day sun.