Halet Effendi, once the favourite of the Sultan, was the cause of the Greek insurrection, which he brought about to conceal his own disloyal views. Having, by his intrigues, caused the appointment of Michel Suzzo to the principality of Moldavia, and having been reproached with the disaffection of Suzzo towards his Imperial master, the minister, who was responsible for the conduct and loyalty of his Greek _protégé_, boldly replied that the disaffection towards the Sultan was not that of Suzzo individually, but of his whole nation; an assertion which he immediately proceeded to bear out by exciting the Greeks covertly to rebellion; and he was so well seconded by his creature that, when Ypsalanti reared his standard in the provinces, Suzzo joined his banner, and the insurrection in the Morea, and the revolt of the Greeks in Constantinople, with the murder of the Patriarch, were the fearful consequences of the rebellious coalition; a treason which Mahmoud visited on his favourite with a sentence of exile to Iconia, giving him, at the same time, an autograph letter, in which he pledged himself to respect both his life and property; but, after the lapse of a few years, repenting an act of clemency so misplaced, the Sultan dispatched a Capedjee-basha, furnished with a Firman of recall, to his banished courtier, who found Halet Effendi at Iconia, and presented his credentials. The exile, overjoyed at so sudden and unlooked-for a change in his fortunes, lost no time in preparing for his return to Constantinople; but he had not long confided himself to the keeping of the Capedjee-basha when the bowstring terminated his existence, and the executioner hastened back to Stamboul, carrying along with him the head of his victim. This ghastly memorial of their benefactor was consigned, at their urgent request, to the Dervishes of Pera, who buried it in their grave-yard, beneath the small slab of stone, which, in a Turkish cemetery, indicates to the initiated that the deceased above whom it is placed has perished by violence; but it had not lain there more than a few days, when the Sultan chanced to inquire how it had been disposed of; and, hearing that it had received burial at this Tekiè, of whose order, entitled Mevlavies, he is himself a member, (and whose chapel in which he formerly performed his evolutions he still frequents, although in private, occupying, on his visits, one of the latticed closets,) he ordered that it should be immediately disinterred and carried to Balata, where the common sewers of the city empty themselves into the Bosphorus. This was accordingly done; and the turban-crested pillar that surmounts the slab now only serves to indicate the spot where rested for a few brief days the dishonoured head of Halet Effendi. CHAPTER IV.