Tradition attributes yet another victory to Suleiman after his death. At the head of a troop of celestial heroes, mounted on white horses, encircled by a brilliant aureole, he is said to have vanquished an army of infidels. The love of the marvellous, so general among orientals, the leaning which all people have to make heaven intervene in the deeds relating to their origin, alone can explain this tradition, for it would be useless to seek any historic fact which could have given it birth. According to this tradition, thirty thousand Christians appeared in the Hellespont on a fleet of sixty-one vessels; one half disembarked at Touzla and the other at Sidi-Kawak; it was this latter body which was cut in pieces by the celestial troop led by Suleiman. The Ottoman historians who relate this miracle have evidently borrowed the apparition of these vessels from the First or the Second Crusade of the Europeans against the Turks, and have transported them from the waters of Smyrna to those of Gallipoli, for the greater glory of Suleiman Pacha. Neither the history of Byzantium nor that of the crusades offers the slightest trace of this event. CONSPIRACY AND DEATH OF MARINO FALIERI AT VENICE A.D. 1355 MRS. MARGARET OLIPHANT Marino Falieri was born at Venice about 1278, and was elected doge in 1354. For many years the government of the republic, under an oligarchy, had been arbitrarily dominated by the Council of Ten, an assembly that, after serving a special purpose for which it was created, was declared permanent in 1325 and became a formidable tribunal. Professing to guard the republic the Ten in fact destroyed its liberties, disposed of its finances, overruled the constitutional legislators, suppressed and excluded the popular element from all voice in public affairs, and finally reduced the nominal prince--the doge--to a mere puppet or an ornamental functionary, still called "head of the state." At the time when Falieri entered upon his dogeship the city in all quarters was pervaded by the spies of this great oligarchy, which seized and imprisoned citizens, and even put them to death, secretly, without itself being answerable to any authority. The most notable event in the annals of this extraordinary Venetian government is that which forms the story of Marino Falieri himself. His conspiracy with the plebeians to assassinate the oligarchs and make himself actual ruler of the state had the double motive of a personal grievance and the sense of a political wrong. The fate of this old man has been made the subject of tragedies by Byron (1820), Casimir Delavigne (1829), and Swinburne (1885). The novel, _Doge und Dogaressa_, by Ernst Theodor Hoffmann, was inspired by the same dramatic figure. Of historical accounts, the following--in Mrs. Oliphant's best manner--is justly regarded as the most impressive which has hitherto appeared in English.