Having stated this much, I may add that it would be an error to suppose that it was expected of me to palliate or gloss over the gravity of any excesses which might have taken place, for such would only have frustrated the object in view. As a matter of fact, no foreign correspondent in Constantinople gave more unvarnished accounts than those published by the _New York Herald_ of the terrible events which subsequently took place in the Turkish capital. One of the salient features of Constantinople is the prevalence of idle gossip, and I had not been there many days before I became aware that my presence and its supposed purpose formed a topic of interest to people whose very existence was unknown to me. One day, entering the Club de Constantinople, near the Pera Palace Hotel, I was addressed in English by a fat, sallow-faced, beardless individual, who told me with the blandest of smiles that he had heard I had come to Constantinople to “write up the Turks,” and that I was to be paid neither more nor less than one million francs to do so. He asked me quite ingenuously whether this was indeed the case. With such an auspicious opening it could not be a matter for surprise that before long the _Herald_ correspondent became an object of curiosity to the large colony of “gobe-mouches” who supplied current gossip in the guise of personal news to Embassies and newspaper correspondents. A conviction had gained ground in diplomatic circles, intensified by the Press in general, that the Turkish Government was, if not actually unwilling, at all events unable to prevent the recurrence of massacres. The agitation on the part of the Armenian Committees in the different capitals of Europe had been carried on to such purpose that there was hardly an American or English newspaper which had a good word left to say of the Turks, let alone of the Turkish Government. A horde of adventurers of various nationalities, déclassés of every sphere of life, cashiered officers among the rest, who had left their native country for its good, were eking out a precarious livelihood by providing newspaper correspondents, if not also Embassies, with backstair information. Others were in the pay of the Sultan or his chamberlains, at the same time acting as spies, watching and reporting the doings of people of note in the capital in the interests of the Palace. Thus whenever a stray communication, signed with some pseudonym, appeared in a newspaper, it was at once assumed that it emanated from a tainted source. For such was the prejudiced state of Anglo-Saxon feeling against the Turks at this particular period—much to the delight of England’s rivals on the spot—that it was quite sufficient to be known as a philo-Turk to be credited with some kind of rascality.