which he took with a gratified smile. In a word, I was a dumb counsellor, and I much regret that the European diplomats on the Bosphorus did not look upon my position in this light, but laid all sorts of political intrigues to my charge; and that my relations to the Sultan, who had me for hours together in his room--and when I was there kept even his most intimate chamberlain at a distance--necessarily gave rise to a good deal of speculation. The long faces, the frowns, the despairing looks which the court officials in the Sultan's immediate vicinity showed me, and the way they measured me when after a long audience I crossed the hall or the park, often startled me and made me feel uncomfortable. These simple folks took me for the devil or some magic spectre personified who had ensnared their sovereign, and was leading him, God only knows whither. There were but few who had a good word for me, and many were quite convinced that at every visit I carried away with me into the land of unbelievers quantities of treasures and gold. When later on through my intercourse with the Moslem scholars and Mollas at court I had made a name as a practical scholar of Islam, and became conspicuous on account of my Persian and Tartar conversational powers, they were still more astonished, and the head-shaking over my enigmatic personality became even more significant. They took me for a deposed Indian prince, a Turkestan scholar exiled by the Russians, but most often for a dangerous person whom it had been better for the Sultan never to have known. To the European circles of Pera I was likewise a riddle. Sometimes alone, sometimes in company with Hungarian academicians, I used to search in the Imperial treasure-house for remains of the library of King Mathias Corvinus, captured by the Turks in Ofen and brought over to Constantinople. I discovered many things, but I was branded as a political secret agent of England. A well-known diplomatist said, "Ce savant est un homme dangereux, il faut se défaire de lui." But the good man was mistaken. I was neither _dangereux_ nor secret agent of any State; for, in the first place, my self-esteem revolted against the assigned _rôle_ of dealer in diplomatic secrets; and, moreover, what Cabinet would think of employing a secret agent outside their Legation, maintained at such great expense? I do not for a moment wish to hide the fact that in my conversations with the Sultan about political questions I always took the side of Austro-Hungary and England; that I was always up in arms against Russia, and launched out against the perfidy, the barbarism, and the insatiable greed for land of the Northern power. More anti-Russian than all Turks and the Sultan himself, I could not well be, and the more I could blacken Russia politically the better service did I fancy I rendered to our European culture. To obviate any suspicion, the Sultan once wanted to invite me to a court dinner together with the Russian Ambassador Nelidoff;