“Through Armenia on Horseback,” by the Rev. George H. Hepworth. New York and London, 1898. Footnote 13: Reference to an offer made me by the proprietor of the _New York Herald_ to go to Berlin as its permanent correspondent, which I declined. Nearly seven years elapsed before circumstances took me back for a short visit to Constantinople. This time I went no longer as the representative of a great newspaper, but only as a private individual. All the greater was the surprise I felt on my arrival to find a warm welcome from the friends I had previously made there. From the Sultan and his entourage down to the kafedji, who used to hand me my cup of coffee in the Palace, and the swarthy arabadji, whose black stallions took me on my daily round of visits, they all seemed to bear one in kindly memory in gratitude for what they deemed were services rendered to their country, and this too, after a lapse of seven long years, in the Mohammedan East! This has often struck me as extraordinary in an age in which a lifetime of beneficent work, even when recognized at all, is forgotten in a week. In the remaining chapters I have striven to reconstruct under different headings the impressions and experiences gained during my various visits to Turkey. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PART II ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VIII YILDIZ The Spider hangs the curtain over princely palaces, The Owl stands sentry on the cupola of Efrasiab. SAADI, _Gulistan_ (Persian) Baluk bashdan kokar. (Turkish Proverb)[14] Footnote 14: “The fish begins to rot at the head.” THE circumstances already related under which I went to Constantinople made me a frequent visitor at the Imperial Palace of Yildiz. The so-called Palace (recently dismantled) consisted of an extensive stretch of park-land surrounded by high walls in which were fair gardens, woodlands, lakes, interspersed with different buildings of the most varied types and kinds. There were mansions, country-houses, stables, stud establishments, military barracks, a theatre—even a zoological garden and a china factory being thrown into the hotch-potch. Several thousand people were gathered here, consisting of the members of the Sultan’s family, their separate establishments and their dependents, besides a horde of Palace officials of every imaginable type and denomination. During thirty years the Sultan of Turkey directed, single-handed, the destinies of his Empire from this place, paralysing every other authority, the official channels of Government included; working as hard as any nigger, yet with chaos in the end.