The late Sultan, Abd-ul-Medjid, was thought a wonder of liberality because he permitted his brother, the present Sultan, to live. But Abd-ul-Medjid's heart had been softened by a sorrow he had had in early life. Shortly before he came to the throne he had a favourite odalisk, to whom he was much attached. In those days none of the royal princes were permitted to become fathers, and the poor girl fell a sacrifice to the State policy which forbade her becoming the mother of a living child. Within a week of her death Sultan Mahmoud died, and his son ascended the throne. Had the odalisk lived and had a son, she would have enjoyed the rank of first "Kadun" to the reigning monarch. The Sultan's rank is so elevated--his position is so far above that of every other mortal--that there is no woman on earth sufficiently his equal to enable him to marry her. He has, therefore, no legal wife, but his ladies are called "Kaduns," or companions, and the mother of his eldest son is always chief kadun, a position that gives her many advantages. These ladies are not called sultanas, for only the princesses of the blood-royal enjoy that title, but the mother of the reigning sovereign is named Sultan-Validé. Occasionally, when there is a subject whom the Sultan wishes especially to honour, the favoured pasha has one of the monarch's daughters or sisters given to him in marriage; but this great distinction is sometimes the cause of much sorrow, and uproots much domestic happiness, as all other wives must be sent away, and the children of such marriages equally banished, before the royal bride will condescend to enter the pasha's harem. Even after marriage, the royal lady will sometimes insist upon retaining all the privileges of her rank, and in that case the husband becomes the veriest slave imaginable, never daring to enter the harem unless summoned by the princess, and when there often obliged to remain standing while receiving the orders of his imperial and imperious wife. F---- Pasha, though his ambition was gratified by becoming the brother-in-law of the Sultan, paid somewhat dearly, if reports be true, for the honour of this royal alliance, as the princess was said to be a lady of uncertain temper, or rather of a very certain temper, as Charles Dickens described it. At any rate F---- Pasha's heart clung to the forsaken wife and children of his humbler and perhaps happier days; and sometimes in the dusk of the evening a small, undecorated caïque, containing a man closely muffled up, might be seen darting swiftly across the Bosphorus from the palace of the lordly pasha to the remote quarter of Scutari, where, in a humble house in a back street, were hid away the poor deserted wife and her little children.