After a successful campaign conquered generals, laden with chains, would be led through for exhibition before the Pâdishah, and captive princesses veiled and followed by their mournful little company of disarmed and helpless attendants; eunuchs of all colors and ranks, seized as spoils of war or offered as gifts to the victorious princes; and in the mean time officers of the conquering army crowded to the treasury doors to deposit rich booty in the shape of sabres studded with pearls and magnificent brocades taken in the sack of some Persian city, the gold and jewels of the vanquished Mamelukes of Egypt, cups of gold found among the treasures of the chevaliers of Rhodes, statues of Diana and Apollo brought from Greece and Hungary, and the keys of conquered cities and strongholds; and others still, led the youths and maidens stolen from the isle of Lesbos into the inner court. All the enormous quantities of stores of every description brought to the Seraglio from the various ports of Africa, Morea, Caramania, and the Ægean Sea were either received between those walls or flowed through them to the inner courts, and an army of majordomos and clerks were kept constantly occupied in registering what was brought, giving receipts, paying out money, and arranging audiences. Merchants from the slave-markets of Brusa and Trebizond would await their turn to enter with poets come from Bagdad to recite their verses in the presence of the Sultan. Governors fallen into disgrace, bearing basins full of gold coins wherewith to purchase pardon, stood side by side with the messenger of a pasha bringing a beautiful girl of thirteen, found, after months of careful search, in a cabin in Anatolia, as a present to the Grand Seignior, and with them emissaries returned from the farthermost confines of the empire, tired little family groups just arrived from some far-off province to seek justice at the hands of their lord, and women and children of the lowest orders in Stambul come to present their grievances before the Divân. On those days when the Divân was to hold its sessions ambassadors from rebel provinces would be seen passing slowly through the curious and mocking crowd, mounted upon asses, with shaven faces and women’s caps upon their heads, or the too insolent envoys of some Asiatic prince with their noses split open by the cimeters of the _sciaùs_. Sometimes state officials would pass out bearing a magnificent shawl which they were to take to a distant governor as a present from the grand vizier, quite unconscious that their own death-sentence was concealed within its folds. Now the radiant face of some ambitious schemer showed that his plots had been so far successful, and a _sanjak_ was his, while the pallid countenance of another proved all too plainly that he had heard in the Divân the first dark rumors of approaching disgrace. Messengers went by with those inexorable _hattiscerifs_ which they were to carry in their