We passed one woman running an American sewing machine, and dad said he'd bet she was an American, and he went up to her and said: “Hello, sis!” She stopped the machine, looked up at dad with a sort of Bowery expression, and said: “Gwan, Chauncey Depew, you old peach, or I'll have you pinched,” and the unique took dad by the arm and pulled him along real spry, but he hung back and looked over his shoulder at the woman, but she went on sewing, and dad said to me: “Well, wouldn't that frost you?” And we went on making the inspection. I don't think I ever saw so many children, outside of an orphan asylum, all about the same size and all looking exactly alike. They all had the same beady black eyes that look as though they were afraid of getting caught in a trap, like muskrats, and their noses had the same inquiring appearance, as though the owner was speculating as to how much money the visitors had in their pockets, and whether it was fastened in. Race suicide is impossible in Turkey, but a race of bandits is growing up that will let no foreigners with a pocketbook escape. It took us an hour to go through the harem, and it was more like going through the quarters of the working women of a home laundry in the tenement district of a large city, than a comic opera, as we had been led to expect by what we had read of harems. When we went into the harem I think dad was going to insist on having the women dance for him, while he sat on a throne and threw kisses at the most beautiful women in all the world, but before we had got around all the box stalls I think if any of them had started to dance dad would have stampeded in a body. We finally got back to the great marble room, where the sultan was sleeping in a stuffed chair, surrounded by his staff, and one of them woke him up, and he asked dad what he thought of the home life of a crowned head, and dad said it beat anything he had ever seen, and he should recommend to his government that the harem system be adopted in America, and actually the sultan seemed pleased. He said as an evidence of his love for America he wanted to present to the president, through dad, 50 of his wives, and if dad would indicate where he wanted them delivered, they would be there, Johnny on the spot, or words to that effect. At first I thought dad would faint away, but I whispered to him that it would be discourteous to decline a present, after giving the sultan a gold mine, and that may be the old man would be so mad, if he declined the wives, that he would tie stones to our legs and sink us in the Bosphor-ous, so dad rallied and said, on behalf of his government, he would accept the kindly and thoughtful gift of his highness, and that he would cable for a war vessel to take the wives to his own America, and he would notify the sultan when to round them up and load them on the vessel.