in solemn tones and with impassive faces, but their icy fingers trembled beneath the great sleeves and their souls they commended to the mercy of God. [H] The sultans sat behind this lattice when giving audience to foreign ambassadors.--TRANS. At the end of this second courtyard, which may be called, in a certain sense, the diplomatic court of the Seraglio, stood the third gate, flanked by marble columns and covered by a wide, overhanging roof, before which, night and day, a troop of white eunuchs and a band of kapuji, armed with sabres and daggers, stood on guard. This was the famous Bâb-i-Sâdet, or Gate of Felicity, leading to the third and innermost enclosure--that sacred portal which for nearly four centuries remained obdurately closed to every Christian who was not the representative of a reigning sovereign or a state; that door at which the supplicating curiosity of thousands of celebrated and influential travellers has knocked in vain; that door from out of which flowed, to spread abroad through every country on the surface of the earth, so many wild and fantastic and romantic tales, so many strange and mournful rumors, so many recitals of love and adventure and shadowy whispers of intrigues and dark conspiracies--so many volumes of poetry, voluptuous, fantastic, and horrible. It was the sacred threshold of the sanctuary of the king of kings, whose name was only pronounced by the common people with bated breath and feelings of secret awe and terror, as though it were the portal leading to some region of enchantment, passing which a profane mortal might suddenly find himself turned to stone or else behold sights which human language would be powerless to express--a door, in short, before which even now the most matter-of-fact, unimaginative traveller pauses with some slight feeling of awe, while his incredulous glance rests upon the lengthened shadow of his own stiff hat as it falls athwart the heavy half-closed doors.