“How are you to-day, my dear pasha?” I asked, as he came beaming with kindliness towards me, shaking hands in European fashion, a form of greeting rarely indulged in by the Turk. “Ah, mon cher!” he replied, as a hamal (porter) passed in front of the window, carrying a dinner tray on his head, “you see that poor fellow! How gladly would I exchange with him, and hand him over all my forty-two Grand Cordons into the bargain, if he could only give me his lusty health in return.” Munir Pasha was a martyr to asthma, and before my next visit to Constantinople he had passed away. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IX SULTAN ABDUL HAMID I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. SHAKESPEARE, _Julius Cæsar_ SO much has been said and written to the detriment of the ex-Sultan Abdul Hamid that it would seem to be an almost hopeless task to break a lance in his favour; and yet to do so, at least with regard to the human aspect of his character, is nothing more than a bare act of justice. As he timidly peeps out of the window of his palatial prison at Begler-Bey, on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, he has now ample leisure to reflect on the ingratitude of those he loaded with his favours. Time hath a wallet at his back Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, A great-sized monster of ingratitude. And if he be familiar with the history of his own time, in bemoaning the unhappy fate of his country he may well re-echo the bitter words of the Austrian ex-Emperor Ferdinand, who, living in retirement at Prague when, in 1866, the victorious Prussians appeared before the city, exclaimed: “Surely it was scarcely worth while to force me to abdicate in order to bring things to their present pass!” Certain figures have come down to us as typical of the extremes of fortune, and some are identified with Constantinople; of these that of Belisarius, the victorious general of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, lies nearest. After great deeds of war, he is said to have ended his days in a prison, through the iron bars of which he implored the charity of passers-by: “Give, oh, give an obolus unto Belisarius, whom virtue had raised and envy has brought so low.”