Sultan Abdul Hamid, a watchful and enlightened ruler, full of national pride, although perhaps a little too anxious and severely absolute, was certainly not the one to lag behind his people in acknowledging merit; and as an unpleasant incident prevented him from showing me his sympathies on my first visit, I was invited a few months later to pay another visit to the Turkish capital as his special guest. To make up for former neglect I received an almost regal reception. The slope up to Pera which in 1857 I had climbed a destitute young adventurer, I now drove up in a royal equipage accompanied by the court officials who had received me at the station; and when I had been installed in the apartments prepared for me by the Sultan's command, and was soon after welcomed by the Grandmaster of Ceremonies on behalf of the sovereign, that old fairy-tale-feeling came over me again. My first quarters at Püspöki's, swarming with rats; my _rôle_ of house-dog in the isolated dwelling of Major A., my _début_ as singer and reciter in the coffee-houses, and many other reminiscences from the struggling beginning of my career in the East, flitted before my eyes in a cloudy vision of the past. On the morning after my arrival I could have stood for hours gazing out of the window on the Bosphorus, recalling a hundred different episodes enacted on this spot, but I was wakened out of these sweet dreams by an adjutant of the Sultan who called to conduct me to an audience at the Yildiz Palace. As I passed through the great entrance hall of the Chit-Kiosk, where the Sultan was wont to receive in the morning, marshals, generals, and high court officials rose from their seats to greet me, and on many faces I detected an expression of astonishment, why, how, and for what their imperial master was doing so much honour to this insignificant, limping European, who was not even an ambassador. When I appeared before the Sultan he came a few steps towards me, shook hands, and made me sit down in an easy chair by his side. At the first words I uttered--of course I made my speech as elegant as I could--surprise was depicted on the face of the Ruler of all True Believers, and when I told him that I remembered him as a twelve-year-old boy in the palace of his sister, Fatma Sultan, the wife of Ali Ghalib Pasha, attending the French lesson which I was giving the princess, the ice was broken at once, and the otherwise timid and suspicious monarch treated me as an old acquaintance. At a sign the chamberlain on duty left the hall, and I remained quite alone with Sultan Abdul Hamid--a distinction thus far not vouchsafed to many Europeans, and not likely to be, as the Sultan is not acquainted with European languages, and therefore, according to the rules of court etiquette, cannot hold a face-to-face interview with foreigners. The conversation turned for the greater part upon persons and events of thirty years past, upon his father, Sultan Abdul Medjid, to whom I had