On a warm summer day there was an element of repose about the surroundings of the Palace soothing to the jaded nerves of the Western European, and quite different from what fancy would conjure up in connexion with the spiritual head of three hundred millions of human beings. A solitary Albanian soldier stood on guard at the entrance of the Palace, close to which on either side were unpretentious-looking porters’ lodges, whose inmates, without any uniform or other distinctive mark of their responsible position, asked you your business. If your face was known to them and a small douceur quickened their memory, you passed through without any further ado. If not, a polite request for your card and a query as to whom you wished to see might bring the request to wait whilst inquiry was made. Or it might be that merely giving the name of some influential official would suffice and you were allowed to proceed on your way. On passing the porter’s lodge into the wall-surrounded precincts of Yildiz and turning to the left, the eye was arrested by a low-lying, bungalow-like building in which a staff was employed to peruse a promiscuous mass of European newspapers, and to translate extracts which were deemed suitable for submission to the Sultan. In the same building the stock of the various Turkish decorations was kept in a cupboard, to which, as occasion arose, the officials would come and take out those that might be wanted for bestowal. Immediately in front of you was another building of a similar, though superior, type. Here the ground floor was devoted to the offices of the Grand Master of Ceremonies; on the first floor was that of the Sultan’s First Secretary, Tahsim Pasha. You passed on to the right towards a slight incline, up which many a fat Turk has toiled breathless, and beheld further to the right a more pretentious and massive structure in that peculiar bastard Oriental style of French design which apparently came into fashion in Turkey in Abdul Aziz’s time, and which, on a larger scale, is represented on the European shores of the Bosphorus by the palaces of Dolma-Baghtchè and Tcheragan, and on the Asiatic side by Begler-Bey, the villa farther away, in which once upon a time the Empress Eugénie had been the Sultan’s guest. In this particular building, in the Palace at Yildiz, Ghazi Osman Pasha had his office and several of the Sultan’s chamberlains had their rooms. There also the sittings of the Supreme Military Commission, over which Osman Pasha presided, were occasionally held.