In the matter of gardens the Turk has never acquired the reputation of his Moorish and Persian cousins. Perhaps it is that he belongs to a younger race and has had more conflicting traditions out of which to evolve a style. For no man likes a garden better than he. He never could put up with a thing like the city back yard or the suburban lawn of the New World. He is given to sitting much out-of-doors, he does not like to be stared at while he is doing it, and he has a great love of flowers. This is one of his most sympathetic traits, and one which was illustrated for me in an unexpected quarter during the late Balkan War when I saw soldiers in a temporary camp laying out patches of turf and pansies around their tents. The fashion of the buttonhole is not yet perfectly acclimated in Constantinople, but nothing is commoner than to observe a grave personage marching along with one rose or one pink in his hand—of which flowers the Turks are inordinately fond. Less grave personages do not scorn to wear a flower over one ear, with its stem stuck under their fez. And I always remember a fireman I once beheld who was not too busy squirting water at a burning house to stop every now and then and smell the rose he held between his teeth.

I cannot claim to know very much about the gardens of Stamboul, though no one can walk there without continually noticing evidences of them—through gateways, over the tops of walls, wherever there is a patch of earth big enough for something green to take root. Any one, however, may know something about the gardens of the Bosphorus. The nature of the ground on which they are laid out, sloping sharply back from the water to an average height of four or five hundred feet and broken by valleys penetrating more gradually into the rolling table-lands of Thrace and Asia Minor, makes it possible to visit many of them without going into them. And the fact has had much to do with their character. Gardens already existed on the banks of the Bosphorus, of course, when the Turk arrived there, and he must have taken them very much as he found them. Plane-trees still grow which, without any doubt, were planted by Byzantine gardeners; and so, perhaps, were certain great stone-pines. I have also wondered if the Turks did not find, when they came, the black and white pebbles, generally arranged in un-Oriental-looking designs, that pave so many garden paths. I am more inclined to believe that these originated in the same order of things as the finer mosaic of church walls than that they were imported from Italy. Perhaps the Italians imported them from Constantinople.

It would be interesting to know whether the Byzantine influence played any part in the gardens of the Renaissance, as it did in so many other arts. However, there is no doubt that the Italian influence came back to Constantinople after the Turkish period. It began to come most definitely, if by a roundabout road, when Sultan Ahmed III imitated the gardens of Versailles. It came again from the same quarter when the successor of Ahmed III sent the son of Twenty-eight Mehmed on another mission to Paris. And it came more definitely still, by a still more roundabout road, when a Russian ambassador brought to Constantinople, at the end of the eighteenth century, a painter named Melling. Like Van Mour, Melling has left most interesting records of the Bosphorus of his day. In the course of time it befell him to be recommended as landscape-gardener to a member of the imperial family, the celebrated Hadijeh Soultan. Through the good graces of this enlightened princess he later became architect to her brother, Sultan Selim III, the Reformer. I do not know whether it was the painter, in turn, who obtained for the Sultan the brother of the gardener of Schönbrunn. But altogether Melling must have done a good deal more for the gardens of the Bosphorus than to paint them.

At the same time, no one has done more for them than the Bosphorus itself. A terrace ten feet long may be as enviable as an estate reaching from the water’s edge to the top of the hill, since it is the blue panorama of the strait, with its busy boats and its background of climbing green, that is the chief ornament of the garden. The Turks lean, accordingly, to the landscape school. Their gardens have, really, very little of an Italian air. The smallest patch of ground in Italy is more architectural than the largest Turkish estate. However much stone and mortar the Turks put together in retaining and enclosing walls, the result has little architectural effect. They do not trim terraces with marble balustrades, while the lack of garden sculpture is with them a matter into which religion enters. Nor do they often plant trees like the Italians—to balance each other, to frame a perspective, to make a background. Still less, I imagine, do they consciously make colour schemes of flowers. And Lady Mary Montagu noted a long time ago the absence of the trim parterres to which she was accustomed. It is perfectly in keeping with Oriental ideas of design, of course, for a Turkish garden not to have too much symmetry. Yet it does have more symmetry than an out-and-out landscaper would countenance, and definitely artificial features. I always wonder whether the natural look of so many paths and stone stairs and terraces is merely a result of time or whether it is an accidental effect of the kind striven for by a school of our own gardeners.

If Turkish gardens tend to look a little wild, it is partly because they contain so many trees. In Constantinople, at least, there is so little rain in summer that it would be almost impossible to keep the gardens green without them—to say nothing of the shade and privacy they afford. The old gardeners evidently studied the decorative effect of different kinds of trees. Those who have never visited Constantinople sometimes imagine the Bosphorus to be overhung by palms—I suppose because it washes the coast of Asia and hows into the Mediterranean. They are accordingly sadly disillusioned when they come to it at the end of a winter in other parts of the Mediterranean and encounter a snow-storm. As a matter of fact, the Bosphorus, which lies in about the same latitude as Long Island Sound, has been solidly frozen over two or three times in history. The last time was in February, 1621. That winter, if I remember correctly, was also severe for certain adventurers lately come from England to Massachusetts Bay. But if palms are as great a rarity in Constantinople as in New York or Connecticut, the trees that do grow there belong to a climate more like northern Italy. Among the most striking of them, and happily one of the commonest, is the stone-pine. These are often magnificent, marching in a row along the edge of a terrace or the top of a hill with full consciousness of their decorative value. The cypress, even more common, seems to me never to have been made the most of. Perhaps the Turks, and the Greeks before them, associated it too much with death to play with it as did the Italians of the Renaissance. The Constantinople variety, it is true, inclines to raggedness rather than to slenderness or height. Other evergreens, including the beautiful cedar of Lebanon, have been domesticated in smaller numbers. Being unscientifically minded, I can say that the magnolia might properly be classed among them, the Magnolia grandiflora of our Southern States, since it keeps its glossy leaves all winter long. One of the less tenacious brotherhood, the plane-tree, is easily king of the Bosphorus, reaching a girth and height that almost fit it for the company of the great trees of California. It always seems to me the most treey of trees, so regularly irregular are the branches and so beautiful a pattern do they make when the leaves are off. Limes, walnuts, chestnuts, horse-chestnuts, Lombardy poplars, acacias of various sorts, mulberries, the Japanese medlar, the dainty pomegranate, the classic bay, are also characteristic. The pale branches of the fig are always decorative, and when the leaves first begin to sprout they look in the sun like green tulips. The olive and the glorious oleander will only thrive in sheltered corners, while oranges and lemons grow in pots. In the hillside parks that are the pride of the larger estates, nightingale-haunted in the spring, pleasantly green in rainless summers, and warmly tawny in the autumn, deciduous trees predominate altogether. Among them is one of heart-shaped leaves and dark capricious branches with whose Latin name I am unacquainted but which is one of the greatest ornaments of the Bosphorus. The Turks call it ergovan, and its blossoming is the signal for them to move to their country houses. In English, I believe, we call it the Judas, after some legend that makes it the tree on which the traitorous apostle hanged himself. He would apparently have been of high descent, for the flowers, which took thereafter the stain of his blood, have a decided violet tinge. They fledge the branches so thickly before the leaves are out that they paint whole hillsides of April with their magenta.

In addition to the woodiness of the Bosphorus gardens, Lady Mary Montagu remarked another element of their character which, I am afraid, has become less frequent since her day. However, if garden sculpture of one kind is rare, garden marbles of another kind do very definitely exist. Here, too, I fancy the Turk found something when he came. There is a smiling lion to be found in certain gardens who, unless I am greatly mistaken, has Byzantine blood in his veins—if that may be said of a water spouter. He is cousin german to the lion of St. Mark, who only improved on him by growing wings. There are also well-heads which are commonly supposed to have been turned to that use by the Turks out of Byzantine capitals. But I do not see why some of them may not be original well-heads. One sees exactly the same sort of thing in Italy, except that the style of ornament is different in the two countries. The purely Turkish garden marbles are of the same general order, having to do with water. And, although there was less need of them when nature had already been so generous, they are what the Turk brought most of himself to the gardens of the Bosphorus. The Turkish well-heads are not particularly interesting, being at their best not much more than a marble barrel. Much more interesting are the marble basins and the upright tablets behind them which mark the head of a water-pipe. These tablets are sometimes charmingly decorated with arabesques and low reliefs of flowers. But the real fountains are the most characteristic, and it seems to me that they offer the most in the way of suggestion to the Western gardener. I think no one has ever understood like the Oriental the poetry of water. Western architects and gardeners have, of course, made great use of decorative water; but we never seem to be happy unless we have a mountain of marble and a torrent of water to work with. Whereas the architects of the East have always known in this matter how to get the greatest effect out of the least material. There are charms in a shallow pool or a minute trickle of water which are of an entirely different order from those of an artificial lake or cascade.

Almost every Turkish garden contains visible water of some sort, which at its simplest is nothing but a shallow marble pool. In the centre of the pool is sometimes a fountain which I always think of with regret when there is pointed out for my admiration a too fat marble infant struggling with a too large marble fish, or a dwarf holding an umbrella over its head. This fountain consists of nothing but a series of jets, generally on varying levels, set in a circle of those marble stalactites—here should one call them stalagmites?—which are so familiar in Oriental architecture. Nothing could be simpler, apparently, but nothing could combine more perfectly all the essentials of a jetting fountain. There is another fountain which deals even more delicately with the sound of water. This is a dripping fountain, set always against a wall or a bank. It is a tall marble tablet, decorated, perhaps, with low reliefs of fruit and flowers, on the face of which a series of tiny basins are carved. I have seen one where water started at the top from the eyes of two doves and trickled into the first little basin, from which it overflowed into two below, then back into one, and so on till it came into three widening semi-circular pools at the bottom. Selsebil is the name of this fountain in Turkish, which is the name of a fountain in Paradise; and a fountain of Paradise it may be indeed with all its little streams atinkle. A more delightful ornament for a garden does not exist, being equally adapted for the end of a vista or for a narrow space; and it requires the smallest supply of water.

The Turkish architects have not scorned more imposing effects when they had the means, as did Ahmed III at Kiat Haneh. The marble cascades into which he turned the Barbyses are called chaghleyan—something which resounds. I have seen a smaller chaghleyan in a garden on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus. This is a series of descending pools, one emptying into another till the water finally runs into a large round marble basin. The water starts, between two curved flights of stone steps, from three marble shells in the retaining wall of a terrace; and from the terrace an arbour looks down the perspective of mirroring pools to an alley that leads from the last basin away between arching trees. This beautiful old garden belongs to the Turkish painter Ressam-Halil Pasha, who studied in Paris at a time when the plastic arts were still anathema among the Turks. In his studio are figure studies, made during his student days, which even now he could scarcely exhibit in Constantinople; and it would be thought a scandalous thing if he tried to get Turkish models to sit for such pictures. When he heard where I came from he asked if there were in America a painter called Mr. Cox, who had studied with him under Gérôme.

There is rivalry between the gardens of the upper, the middle, and the lower Bosphorus with regard to their advantages of position. The upper Bosphorus is the most desirable from the European point of view. This preference is fairly well established, for Lady Mary Montagu wrote letters from Belgrade Forest two hundred years ago, and about the same time a summer colony composed of Europeans and of the great Phanariote families began to gather at Büyük Dereh and Therapia. In much earlier times, however, the Byzantine emperors built villas at Therapia, and the very name of the place indicates the antiquity of its repute as a place of resort. The name has come down in the story of Jason and the Argo, who sailed between these shores in the dawn of legend. When those early voyagers returned from Colchis with Medea, that formidable passenger threw out poison on the Thracian shore; whence the name Pharmakia, changed by the euphemism of the Greeks to Therapia, or Healing. There are reasons, to be sure, why it is better to look at Therapia than to be in it. The view it commands is the bleakest on the Bosphorus, and the prevailing north wind of midsummer, the meltem, which keeps the strait much cooler than you would imagine from its latitude, sometimes gets on one’s nerves. Nevertheless Therapia is a centre for an extraordinary variety of pleasant excursions, there are delicious gardens in the clefts of its hills, and from May till October the embassies impart to it such gaiety as the somewhat meagre social resources of Constantinople afford. I shall be surprised if the proximity of Belgrade Forest and the magnificent beach of Kilios on the Black Sea, to say nothing of the various other resources of the Bosphorus and the Marmora, do not some day make Therapia much more famous as a summer resort.

Constantinople is, I believe, the sole diplomatic post to which summer residences are attached. Each envoy also has a launch for keeping in touch with the Sublime Porte, fifteen miles away. The local legend is that the birds which are so characteristic a feature of the Bosphorus—halcyons are they?—for ever skimming up and down just above the surface of the water, are the souls of the Phanariote dragomans who used to go back and forth so often between Therapia and Stamboul. A despatch-boat, as well, is at the disposal of each ambassador except the Persian. These dignities came about very naturally by reason of the epidemics and disorders which used to break out in the city, the distance of Constantinople from other European resorts, and the generosity of the sultans. The English, French, and German governments all own beautiful estates at Therapia, presented to them by different sultans, while the Russians are magnificently established at the neighbouring village of Büyük Dereh. Their great hillside park is a perfect wood, so dense in summer that the water is scarcely visible from it. The Italians also make villeggiatura at Therapia, the Austrians and Persians being installed farther down the Bosphorus. Our ambassador is the sole envoy of his rank obliged to hunt up hired quarters, though even some of the small legations occupy their own summer homes. Should Congress ever persuade itself that diplomatic dignity is a thing worthy to be upheld, or should some sultan present us with one of the old estates still available, I hope we shall build an embassy, like the one the French occupied so long, in keeping with its surroundings and not such a monstrosity as other Powers have put up. The charming old French embassy, which originally belonged to the famous Ypsilanti family, was one of the sights of the Bosphorus until it burned up in 1913. The grounds are not so large as some of the other embassy gardens, but none of the others seem to me so happily placed or so sapiently laid out. A bridge led from the house to the first terrace, whose trees and flowers irregularly follow the curve of the hillside. A formal avenue and steep wood paths mount to the grassy upper terrace, commanding between noble pines and beeches the mouth of the Black Sea.

There are Turks, of course, in the upper Bosphorus, as there are Christians in the middle Bosphorus. One of the most conspicuous of all the Bosphorus gardens is at Beïkos, on the Asiatic shore—which, for the rest, is much more Turkish than the European. Beïkos is also connected with the Argonauts, being the place where they met with so unkind a welcome from Amycus, king of the Bebryces. He or some other mythic personage is supposed to have been buried on the hilltop behind Beïkos. This height, popularly known as Giant’s Mountain, is the only one on the Bosphorus from which you can see both the Black Sea and the Marmora—as Byron recorded in a notorious stanza. A giant grave is still to be seen there, some twenty feet long, which the Turks honour as that of rather an unexpected personage. A little mosque adjoins the grave—built, I believe, by the ambassador Twenty-eight Mehmed—and in the mosque is this interesting inscription: “Here lies his excellency Joshua, the son of Nun, who although not numbered among the apostles may well be called a true prophet sent of God. He was despatched by Moses (on whom be peace) to fight the people of Rome. While the battle was yet unfinished the sun set. Joshua caused the sun to rise again and the Romans could not escape. This miracle convinced them; and when Joshua invited them, after the battle, to accept the true faith, they believed and accepted it. If any man doubts, let him look into the sacred writings at the Holy Places of the Christians and he will be satisfied.” The garden I have wandered so far away from rises on a pyramid of terraces at the mouth of a smiling valley which bears the grim name of Hounkyar Iskelesi—the Landing-Place of the Manslayer. A white palace crowns the pyramid, facing the long river-like vista of the Bosphorus. The palace was built by the great Mehmed Ali, of Egypt, to whom the sultan of the day paid the honour of coming to see his new pleasure-house and of expressing his admiration of it. The viceroy accordingly assured his majesty, as Oriental etiquette demands, that the palace and everything in it was his. Whereupon his majesty, to the no small chagrin of the viceroy, graciously signified his acceptance of the gift.

Beïkos and the shores of its great bay were a favourite resort of sultans long before the day of Mehmed Ali. In general, however, the Turks have always preferred the narrow middle stretch of the Bosphorus; and for most reasons I am with them. The summer meltem—which some derive from the Italian maltempo—often intensely irritating near the mouth of the Black Sea, is here somewhat tempered by the windings of the strait. Then here the coasts of the two continents approach each other most closely, are most gracefully modelled and greenly wooded. The Asiatic shore in particular, which opposite Therapia is forbidding enough, is here a land of enchantment, with its gardens, its groves, its happy valleys, its tempting points and bays, its sky-line of cypresses and stone-pines, its weathered wooden villages, its ruined waterside castle of Anadolou Hissar, its far-famed Sweet Waters—and most so if seen from Europe in a light of sunset or early morning. If Mehmed Ali lost his palace at Beïkos—and on Arnaout-kyöi Point there are the ruins of another one which he was stopped from building—several of the most enviable estates along this part of the Bosphorus belong to his descendants. The beautiful wooded cape of Chibouklou, on the Asiatic side, is crowned by the mauresque château of the present Khedive. Directly opposite, on the southern point of Stenia Bay, is the immense old tumble-down wooden palace of his grandfather Ismaïl, the spendthrift Khedive of the Suez Canal, who died there in exile. The garden behind it is the largest and, historically, one of the most interesting on the Bosphorus. The name of the bay is derived, according to one story, from that of the Temple of Sosthenia, or Safety, built by the Argonauts after their escape from King Amycus. A temple of Hecate was also known there in more authentic times, and a church dedicated to the Archangel Michael by Constantine the Great. On a stormy night of 1352, the admirals Nicolò Pisani of Venice and Paganino Doria of Genoa unwittingly took shelter in the bay within bow-shot of each other, during an interval of a long sea-fight which raged between them the whole length of the Bosphorus. Emirgyan, the name of the village in which the khedivial estate is situated, was that of a Persian general who surrendered Erivan to Sultan Mourad IV in 1635, and who ended his days in pleasant captivity on this wooded shore. His beautiful Persian palace of Feridoun was the wonder of its day. His conqueror used often to visit him there, for Emirgyan was a man of wit and an accomplished musician. Not only did he first introduce into Turkey a sort of Persian bassoon and the four-stringed Persian chartar from which we get our guitar, but he marked a new epoch in Turkish music. There were also other reasons why Mourad used to visit the palace of Feridoun, where, “in the design of refreshing his vital spirits and of summoning the warmth which awakens joy, it pleased” the Sultan “to give rein to the light courser of the beverage of the sunrise”—as a discreet historian put that violent young man’s propensity to strong waters. It was after a debauch here that he died, at the age of twenty-eight, having beheaded a hundred thousand of his people and having entertained a strange ambition to be the last of his line. He gave orders on his death-bed that the head of his brother Ibrahim, the last surviving male of his blood, be brought to him. But his courtiers took advantage of his condition to dissemble their disobedience, and the imperial family to-day springs from that brother. As for the luckless Emirgyan, he saved his head from the elder brother, only to be deprived of it by the younger.

At Roumeli Hissar, still farther to the south, is a neglected garden which belonged to Halim Pasha, brother of the prodigal Ismaïl. In it are two unpretentious houses which look as if they were built of brown stucco. There is sentiment in that stucco, however, for it is really mud brought from the banks of the Nile. According to the law of Islam Halim would have been Khedive in turn if Ismaïl had not bound the Turkish government, by a substantial quid pro quo, to make the viceroyalty hereditary to the eldest son in his own family. And Halim Pasha’s family later suffered the misfortune to be nearly ruined by an English speculator.

But there is one spot in their park which must have gone far to make up for their disinheritance. It is the brow of a bluff which seems to drop sheer into the Bosphorus. There an artful group of cypresses and one gnarled olive frame the blue below; and there on sunny afternoons, there most notably on starry evenings, when shore lights curve fantastically through the underlying darkness and all land and water sounds have some summer magic in them, an Antony might dream away content the loss of Egypt.

Halim Pasha owned another splendid garden on Bebek Bay. Next to his faded pink wooden yalî in the dignified old Turkish style, and likewise linked by bridges across the public road to a park that climbs the hill behind, is the trim art-nouveau villa of the actual Khedive’s mother. This majestic old lady is one of the most familiar figures on the Bosphorus. Her annual approach and departure on her son’s big turbine yacht Mahroussah are the signals for spring and autumn to open their campaigns, while her skimming mahogany steam-launch is an integral part of summer. She is, moreover, a person whom the poor of her neighbourhood have cause to bless. During the lenten month of Ramazan she provides iftar, the sunset breakfast of the day, for any who choose to come to her door. So many choose to come that during that month her grocery bills must be quite appalling. And on occasions of public rejoicing she literally keeps open house—or open garden. She admits any and all within her gates, offers them coffee, ices, and cigarettes, and entertains them with music.

The custom, for the rest, is common among the Turks at all times of festivity. I remember going one night to another garden in Bebek, not by invitation but because any one was free to go in order to celebrate the accession day of his majesty Abd ül Hamid II. The garden belonged to a younger brother of that personage, popularly known as Cowherd Solomon Esquire. For Turkish princes have no title other than that of their humblest subject. A band was playing in the garden, which is on the very top of Bebek hill, and the Greeks of the village were dancing among the flower-beds, while a row of little princes and princesses in big gilt armchairs looked solemnly on. Beyond them a clump of huge umbrella-pines lifted themselves darkly against the fairy scene of the illuminated Bosphorus. Every other villa was outlined in light, the water burned with reflections of architectural designs or of Arabic texts of fire, and the far-away hill of Chamlîja was one twinkling field of the cloth of gold. Süleïman Effendi was reported to be not too strong in the head but to make up for it by possessing the Evil Eye and the greatest understanding of cows of any man in Constantinople. Of these he kept a large herd, selling their milk like any commoner; and when he wished to add to their number no man dared refuse to sell to him. If he did the cow in question was sure to die within the month by reason of the Evil Eye of the imperial milkman. Abd ül Hamid caused this eccentric old gentleman much unhappiness, tormenting him greatly with spies. Süleïman Effendi lived long enough to see the last of the spies, however, if not of Abd ül Hamid. And he must have been not altogether destitute of human qualities, for his wife died of grief the day after his death.

The picturesque bay of Bebek and the opposite headland of Kandilli are so involved with historic memories that I am more and more tempted to stray out of my gardens. Kandilli, in particular, is full of plane-trees and terraces and rows of stone-pines to prove that older generations were not blind to its enchantments. Among other sultans, Mehmed IV spent much of his time there. His favourite wife was the lady of taste and determination who built the mosque of the New Mother in Scutari. Discovering once that her lord spent more of his hours than she found proper in the society of a Circassian dancing-girl, she caused a man slave of her own to be educated in the terpsichorean art and presented him to the Sultan. She then asked one night, as they sat at the edge of the water at Kandilli, that the two dancers perform together for her amusement. The slaves accordingly danced on the terrace before their imperial masters, nearer and nearer the water, till the man, by a seemingly careless thrust of his foot, tripped his companion into the Bosphorus. She was immediately carried away into the dark by the current, here extremely swift; and the Sultana doubtless slept the more sweetly, knowing there was one less dancer in the world.

I do not know whether the imperial villa near the boat landing that was torn down in 1913 was the scene of this little drama. Yalî is the true name of such a country house, if it is built, as it should be, on the edge of the water, with gateways letting a little of the Bosphorus into the lower hall and making there a boat-house and porte cochère in one. In every country place of any size there is a kyöshk as well, otherwise a kiosk, built somewhere in the garden and constituting one of its more formal ornaments. I once had the honour of being received in a kiosk belonging to a member of the imperial family, which was larger than the yalî to which it belonged. It was, alas, no such place as I have read of in Lady Mary Montagu, who describes a room built by the sultan of her day for his daughter, “wainscotted with mother of pearl fastened with emeralds like nails.” She also speaks of wainscotting of “cedar set off with silver nails” and “walls all crusted with Japan China,” “the whole adorned with a profusion of marble, gilding, and the most exquisite painting of fruit and flowers.” These splendours were no invention of Lady Mary, for many other visitors testify to them, as well as Melling, Van Mour, and all their school of painters of the Bosphorus. Those villas never were of an enduring architecture, and the spell of Europe—more potent than ever for us was that of the gorgeous East—has been more fatal to them than time and fire. Still, the most modern yalî, if designed by an architect of the country, almost always has some saving touch of its own. And in the middle Bosphorus there are quite a number of houses which preserve the graceful old architecture.

The number of those which preserve even a remnant of the old interior decoration is much more limited. One of them is a kiosk at Emirgyan belonging to the Sherifs of Mecca. And it is quaint to see what an air, both whimsical and distinguished, that faded eighteenth-century decoration gains from the ugly modern furniture set about a fountain in the cross-shaped saloon of those descendants of the Prophet. The most complete example of the work of the same period is the house on Arnaout-kyöi Point belonging to an Armenian family, unmistakable by its projecting upper stories and the agreeable irregularity of its silhouette. Passers along the quay may catch a glimpse of a high rococo ceiling in rose and gold. But a glimpse of a more perfect ceiling is to be caught by any one who rows up the Asiatic shore from Anadolou Hissar—if he be not too contemptuous of certain crazy wooden piles which his caïque will pass.

This ceiling, and the whole room to which it belongs, is the most precious thing of its kind in all Constantinople, if not in all the world. The design of the room is that of the earlier Broussa mosques, a T-shaped arrangement with the top of the T in the garden and three square bays, slightly raised above a central square, leaning out on piles above the water. At the intersection of the two axes stands a fountain, with a cluster of marble stalactites rising from a filigree marble pedestal, in the centre of a shallow square tank of marble. On the garden side, where the door is, there are no windows, but a series of cupboards and niches of some light wood once delicately inlaid with wavy stems and pointed leaves. On the water side an unbroken succession of windows, not very tall and set at the level of the divan, look north and west and south, and bring the Bosphorus like a great sparkling frieze into the pavilion. They also make the water light, by reflection, the upper part of the room. At the height of the window tops a shelf, slightly carved and gilded, runs entirely around the walls. Above that rises a frieze of painted panels in which tall sprays of lilies and other flowers stand in blue and white jars, each in a pointed arch and each framed by garlands of tiny conventionalised flowers. And above all hangs a golden ceiling, domed over the fountain, over each bay hollowed into an oblong recess, lovely with latticework and stalactites and carved bosses and Moorish traceries of interlaced stars, and strange border loops of a blue that echoes the jars below or the sea outside, and touches of a deep green, and exquisite little flowers, all shimmering in a light of restless water.

The creator of this masterpiece was that great friend of the arts Kyöprülü Hüsseïn Pasha, to whose medresseh in Stamboul I have already referred. His yalî has disappeared and his legendary pleasure-grounds are now a wilderness, albeit superlatively pleasant still either to look into or to look out of. In them is one of the sixteen famous springs of Hafid Effendi. Historic garden-parties were given in this garden, and ambassadors whom sultans delighted to honour were taken to sit in the golden room. It used to be a detached kiosk in Hüsseïn Pasha’s garden. In modern times a house has been added to it, and a retired provincial governor has inherited the fallen splendour of the Kyöprülüs. Some day, I suppose, it will all go up in smoke or tumble into the Bosphorus. In the meantime the fountain is still, the precious marquetry has been picked out of the doors, the woodwork cracks and sags, the blue jars and the flowers become more and more ghostly, the gold of the ceiling grows dimmer every day. But even so, the golden room has a charm that it can never have had when the afternoon sun first shimmered into it.

The gardens of the lower Bosphorus are in many ways less picturesque than those nearer the Black Sea. The hills on which they lie are in general lower, farther apart, and more thickly covered with houses. With their milder air, however, their more Mediterranean light, and their glimpse into the Sea of Marmora, they enjoy another, a supreme, advantage. The upper Bosphorus—well, in other places you may see sharply rising slopes terraced or wooded. Beside the Nordfjord, the coast of Dalmatia, or Lake Como, where would the Bosphorus be? But nowhere else may you behold the silhouette of Stamboul. And that, pricking the sky above its busy harbour, just not closing the wide perspective that shines away to the south, is the unparalleled ornament of the gardens of the lower Bosphorus. The garden that Melling laid out for the princess Hadijeh was in this part of the strait, at the point of Defterdar Bournou, above Orta-kyöi. Abd ül Hamid, who to his other crimes added a culpable crudity of taste, pulled down the princess’s charming old house in order to build two hideous new ones for two daughters of his own. Most of the finest sites in the neighbourhood, or on the opposite shore, belong or have belonged to different members of the imperial family. Abd ül Hamid himself was brought back from Salonica at the outbreak of the Balkan War and shut up in the Asiatic garden of Beïlerbeï. In this old pleasance of the sultans Abd ül Aziz built a palace for the empress Eugénie when she went to the East to open the Suez Canal. It must have been strange to Abd ül Hamid to look out from its windows at the opposite park where he reigned for thirty-three years. The city of palaces which grew up around him there was never known otherwise than as Yîldîz Kiosk—the Pavilion of the Star—from a kyöshk his father built. Another pavilion in that park, also visible from Beïlerbeï, is the Malta Kiosk, where Abd ül Hamid’s older brother Mourad passed the first months of his long captivity, and where Midhat Pasha, father of the Turkish constitution, was iniquitously tried for the murder of Abd ül Aziz. In the pleasant lower hall of this little palace, almost filled by a marble basin of goldfish, it is not easy to reconstitute that drama so fateful for Turkey—which did not end when Abd ül Hamid received from Arabia, in a box labelled “Old Japanese Ivory,” the head of the murdered patriot.

The park of Yîldîz originally belonged to the palace whose name of Chira’an—The Torches—has been corrupted by Europeans into Cheragan. Only a ruin stands there now, on which Abd ül Aziz once squandered half the revenues of the empire. He stumbled on the threshold the first time he went into his new house, and never would live in it; but after his dethronement he either committed suicide or was murdered there. His successor, Mourad V, dethroned in turn after a reign of three months, lived in his unhappy uncle’s palace for nearly thirty years. Abd ül Hamid is said to have kept his brother so rigorously that the ladies of the family were at one time compelled to dress in the curtains of the palace. The so-called mad Sultan, deprived of books and even of writing materials, taught his children to read and write by means of charcoal on the parquet floor. The imperial prisoner occupied the central rooms of the palace, the doors leading from which were nailed up. When architects were called after his death to put the palace in order they found a foot of water standing on the marble floor of the state entrance, at the north end; and street dogs, jumping in and out of the broken windows, lived in the magnificent throne-room above. Upon his own dethronement, Abd ül Hamid begged to be allowed to retire to this splendid residence. It was presented, instead, to the nation by Sultan Mehmed V for a parliament house. But after two months of occupancy as such it was destroyed by fire. It was only the last of many palaces, one of which was built by Selim III and in which Melling, again, had a hand. The name Chira’an goes back, I believe, to the time of Ahmed III, whose Grand Vizier and son-in-law, Ibrahim Pasha, had a palace there. This minister, by some reports a renegade Armenian, is famous in Turkish annals for his liberal administration, for his many public buildings, and for his introduction of printing into the Ottoman Empire. Among his other talents was one for humouring the tastes of his splendour-loving master. Ibrahim Pasha gave the Sultan one night at Chira’an a garden-party, at which countless tortoises, with lights fastened to their shells, made a moving illumination among the trees. Whence the name of The Torches.

Ahmed III gave many similar entertainments in his own gardens on Seraglio Point, sometimes fêtes of lights, sometimes fêtes of flowers. Of the latter he had such an admiration that he created at his court a Master of Flowers, whose credentials, ornamented by gilt roses, ended thus: “We command that all gardeners recognise for their chief the bearer of this diploma; that they be in his presence all eye like the narcissus, all ear like the rose; that they have not ten tongues like the lily; that they transform not the pointed pistil of the tongue into the thorn of the pomegranate, dyeing it in the blood of inconvenient words. Let them be modest, and let them keep, like the rosebud, their lips closed. Let them not speak before their time, like the blue hyacinth, which scatters its perfume before men ask for it. Finally, let them humbly incline themselves before him like the violet, and let them not show themselves recalcitrant.” The tulip does not seem to be mentioned in this document, but the culture of tulips under Ahmed III and his congenial Grand Vizier became as extravagant a rage as ever it did in Holland. Indeed, tulips were first introduced into the Low Countries from Constantinople, by the Fleming Ogier de Busbecq, ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to Süleïman the Magnificent. Under the Latinised form of his name he has left a quaint memoir of his two embassies. The word tulip is a corruption of the Turkish word dülbend—turban—which was a favourite nickname of the flower among the Turks. Ahmed III always celebrated tulip time, inviting the grandees of the empire to come and admire his tulip beds. He devised a way of illuminating them at night with the small glass cup lamps used in mosques. Mahmoud I was of a taste to continue this pretty custom. He also laid out special tulip and hyacinth gardens behind the summer palace he built at the water’s edge. Alleys of cypress-trees were there, and a great pool of marble, and about it the slaves of the harem would sing and dance in the fairy light of the illuminated flowers.

Nothing is left now of this garden, or the palace to which it belonged, or the Gate of the Cannon, after which they were named. A disastrous fire and the building of the Bulgarian railway long made a waste of the tip of Seraglio Point, until in 1913 it was turned into a public park. Seraglio Point is an Italian misnomer for the Turkish Seraï Bournou—Palace Point. But a palace and gardens remain, not far away, and to them has been transferred the title of Top Kapou—Cannon Gate. Although this is now the oldest palace in Constantinople, the name of Eski Seraï—the Old Palace—belongs to the site of that older one which the Conqueror built on the hill of the War Department. He was the first, however, to set apart Seraglio Point as a pleasure-ground for his family, and he built the Chinili-Kyöshk, now of the Imperial Museum. His son and grandson built other pavilions of their own, but it was not until the reign of his great-grandson Süleïman I that the court was definitely transferred to the Seraglio. As in the Palace of Celestial Purity in the Forbidden City, no woman had up to that time been permitted to sleep there. And it is perhaps significant that the decadence of the empire began very soon after the transfer of the harem to the new palace. From that time on the Old Palace, whose grounds Süleïman greatly curtailed to make room for his two principal mosques, was reserved for the families of deceased sultans, while the new palace was continually enlarged and beautified. Something legendary attaches to it in the eyes of the common people, who are pleasantly inclined to confuse King Solomon, the friend of the Queen of Sheba, and a great personage in Mohammedan folklore, with their own Sultan Süleïman. A soldier from Asia Minor related to me once how Sultan Solomon sent out four birds to the four quarters of heaven to discover the most perfect site for a palace, and how they came back with the news that no place was to be found in the world so airy or so beautiful as Seraglio Point. He accordingly built the palace of Top Kapou. And beneath it he hollowed out a space reaching far under the sea in which he planted a forest of marble pillars. I cannot vouch for the last part of the story, but I am inclined to agree with the Sultan’s birds. Certainly the garden of the Seraglio has its superb situation between the Golden Horn and the Marmora, its crescent panorama of cities, seas, and islands, and its mementoes of the past, to put it alone among the gardens of the world. Acropolis of ancient Byzantium, pleasance of Roman, Greek, and Ottoman emperors for sixteen hundred years, it is more haunted by associations than any other garden in Europe. One could make a library alone of the precious things its triple walls enclose: the column of Claudius Gothicus, the oldest Roman monument in the city; the church of St. Irene, originally built by Constantine, whose mosaics look down as Justinian and Leo left them on the keys of conquered cities, the battle-flags of a hundred fields, the arms and trophies of the martial period of the Turks; the sarcophagus of Alexander, which is but one of the glories of the museum; the imperial library, where the MS. of Critobulus was discovered; the imperial treasury, with its jewels, coins, rare stuffs, gemmed furniture, the gifts and spoil of kings, in vaults too dim and crowded for their splendour to be seen; the sacred relics of the Prophet which Selim I captured with Egypt and which constitute the credentials of the sultans to the caliphate of Islam. The structure in which these are preserved, its broad eaves and crusting of flowered tiles reflected in a pool bordered by lanterns to be lit on holy nights, is one of the things that make that garden incomparable. Then there are quaint turrets and doorways; there are kiosks; there are terraces; there are white cloisters a little grassy and neglected; there are black cypresses and monstrous plane-trees into which the sun looks with such an air of antique familiarity.

Of all this every one has written who has ever been to Constantinople. But not many have written of a part of the garden which until the fall of Abd ül Hamid almost no outsider had visited. A few wrote then of the strange scene which took place there when the slaves of the deposed Sultan were set at liberty, and any Circassian who believed himself to have a relative in the imperial harem was invited to come and take her away. The dramatic contrasts and disappointments one could imagine made a true term to all the passionate associations of that place. No one lives there now. When a few more years have passed and no breathing person has any vital memory connected with it, the harem of the old Seraglio will be, like how many other places devised by a man to house his own life, a resort for sightseers at so much a head, a mere piece of the taste of a time. As it is, the Gate of Felicity does not open too easily, and one can still feel the irony of its name.