Beautiful is Constantinople, the great city of palaces, mosques, minarets and cypresses; but how much more beautiful must that paradise have been under the dispensation of Olympus, before the unspeakable Turk, and the hardly more speakable Christian of those parts, had made it the centre of their ignoble tussles, intrigues, cruelties, robberies and murders! The day had not long broken when on a dismal morning—October 4th—we escaped from a polychrome and polyglot crowd which besieged our ship, and following our luggage borne by sturdy Hamals, made our way through mud and slosh up the Grande Rue de Pera to Misseri’s Hotel. There was a magic in the name, for had not old Misseri been made famous by Kinglake? Was he not, _longo intervallo_, the second hero of that immortal book “Eothen?” And was he not himself grown rich and fat and well-liking, a Pasha of many tales, and all of them in honour of his old master, whom he loved, and whom I was only to know many years later? When I had ridden to Therapia and deposited my bags at the British Embassy, where Mr. William Stuart was then the Ambassador’s vicegerent, I went back to Constantinople. Stuart was an excellent official, famous for having penetrated all those arcana of cookery in which Brillat Savarin himself was not a greater adept. It is a study well worth the attention of diplomatists, for who can say what difficulties an excellent dinner has not smoothed over? And here let me, in passing, pay a tribute to my greatest living friend among British Ambassadors, the prince of modern diplomatists and experts in dining as a fine art. But I will say no more, lest I should be suspected of fishing for an invitation—if only a sea which I am never likely again to cross did not lie between him and me that might be possible; as it is, I can meet accusation with firmness. Of course we went to see all the sights of Stamboul—_non ragionam di lor_. What delighted me far more than the mosques, the dancing and howling dervishes, the tombs of magnificent Sultans, and all the stock-in-trade of the dragoman, was wandering through by-ways in the city, happening upon out-of-the-way, unsuspected, picturesque nooks and corners—above all, certain old graveyards, with their quaint turbaned memorial stones, over which the tall, solemn cypresses mount reverent guard—warders watching over the peace of the dead Moslem. There was one such cemetery hard by a tiny mosque, on one side of which the jealously latticed window of a harem looked out, and I could picture to myself Amina the ghoul, stealing out of her prison in the dark hours of the night to practise her unholy rites among the mouldering dead. There were still places in Constantinople where, far from the madding crowd of frock-coated modernity, the glamour of the East retained its power.