The Christian element, as compared with the Moslem, has increased enormously; the European quarter of the city is full of life and animation, and the Turk, always wont to walk with bowed head, now bends it quite low on his breast as he loiters among the noisy, busy crowds of the Christian populace. He is buried in thought; but whether he will be able to pull himself together and recover himself is as yet an open question. When speaking of my renewed visits to Turkey and my personal intercourse with the Sultan, I made mention of my English sympathies; and I feel bound to say a word about the rumours then prevalent, which made me out to be a secret political agent of England, the more so since a member of Parliament, Mr. Summers, has questioned the Conservative Government regarding this matter. I have never at any time stood in any official relation to the English Government. My intercourse with the Conservative and Liberal statesmen on the Thames and on the Hugli (Calcutta) has always been of a strictly private nature, and, just as my utterances in the daily papers were taken notice of by the public, so my occasional memoranda to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have been accepted as the private information of an expert, friendly to the cause of England--information for which nobody asked me, and for which labour therefore I could claim no compensation from anybody. This anomalous position of mine was touched upon by the Central Asiatic writer, Mr. Charles Marvin, in his _Merv, the Queen of the World_[2] issued, in 1881. He there blames the English Government for having neglected me, and for leaving me in poverty, in spite of all my services. As regards this, I must say that I had at one time a modest yearly income, while working with all my might for the defence of India, a possession from which England derived in commercial profits alone many million pounds sterling; but I never suffered actual poverty, and it never entered my mind to take steps to obtain material acknowledgment of my services. English statesmen least of all thought of making any such acknowledgment. They looked upon me merely as a writer in pursuit of a purely platonic object, and this English cynicism went so far that when I published, in 1885, my Osbeg Epic, the "Scheibaniade," entirely at my own cost, and asked for a subscription for twenty copies, the India Office declined the offer, although this work furnished so many data for the history of Baber, the founder of the Mongol dominion in India. The supposition, therefore, that my journalistic labours, although appreciated in England, ever met with any material recognition on the part of the Government, is altogether false. In after years I had an offer to enter the English service, but this I never entertained for a moment; and when on the Bosphorus I furthered English interests, I did so from the standpoint of European peace, as an opponent of the overbearing power of despotic Russia, and as a Hungarian whose native