The subject is assuredly one which lends itself to florid phrases and highly wrought periods; but it is unfortunate that in this case, as in many others, the imagination far outruns the fact. I say unfortunate, because those readers who love to “sup full of horrors,” when they have wept over the affecting image of beauty struggling against the grasp of the executioner, and dark eyes looking reproach upon their murderer from amid the deep waters which are so soon to quench their light for ever, do not like to descend to the sober assurance that none of these things can be; and that the veracious chroniclers who have excited their sensibilities, and misled their reason, have only built up a pathetic sketch upon inference, and in reality know nothing at all about the matter. There is no romance in one of these frightful executions—all is harsh unmitigated horror! The victim may, or may not, be young and beautiful; her executioners have no opportunity of judging. She may be the impersonation of grace, and they must remain equally ignorant of the fact; for she has neither power nor opportunity to excite sympathy, were she the loveliest houri who ever escaped from the paradise of Mahomet. I have a friend, a man in place and power, who, during the time of the Janissaries, and but a few months previous to the annihilation of their body, had been detained in the Palace of one of the Ministers until three hours past midnight; and who, on passing across the deep bay near the Castle of Europe, was startled by perceiving two caïques bearing lights, lying upon their oars in the centre of the stream. His curiosity being excited, he desired his boatmen to pull towards them, when at the instant that he came alongside, he discovered that they were filled by police officers; and at the same moment, a female closely shrouded in a yashmac, and with the mouth of a sack, into which her whole body had been thrust, tied about her throat, was lifted in the arms of two men from the bottom of the furthest caïque, and flung into the deep waters of the bay. As no weight had been appended to the sack, the miserable woman almost instantly re-appeared upon the surface, when she was beaten down by the oars of the boatmen; and this ruthless and revolting ceremony was repeated several times ere the body finally sank. My friend, heart-sick at the spectacle to which he had so unexpectedly become a witness, demanded of the principal officer, by whom he had been instantly recognized, the crime of the wretched victim who had just perished; and learnt that she was the wife of a Janissary whom the Sultan had caused to be strangled some weeks previously; and who, in her anguish at the fate of her husband, had since rashly permitted herself to speak in terms of hatred and disgust of the government by whose agency she had been widowed. On that fatal morning she had paid the price of her indiscretion.