The dogs were one of the sights we were anxious to see; the Sultan was the other.  We found the bazaars more fascinating than either.  But we wanted to photograph the Sultan—­chiefly, I think, because it was forbidden.  I have an ever-present unruly desire to do everything which these foreign countries absolutely forbid.  But everybody said we could not.  So we very meekly went to see him go to prayers, and left our cameras with the kavass.  We had, with our customary good fortune, a window directly in front of the Sultan’s gate, not twenty feet from the door of the mosque.

“If I had that camera here I could get him, and nobody would know!” I declared.

“But there are so many spies,” our Turkish friend said.  “It would be too dangerous.”

We waited, and waited, and waited.  Never have the hours seemed so mortally long as they seemed to us as we watched the hands of the clock crawl past luncheon-time, hours and hours later than the Sultan was announced to pray, and still no Sultan.  His little six-and seven-year old sons, in the uniform of colonels, were mounted on superb Arabian horses.  These horses had tails so long that servants held them up going through the mud, as if they were ladies’ trains.  The children were dear things, with clear olive complexions and soft, dark eyes—­Italian eyes.  Then they grew tired of waiting, and dismounted, and came up to where we were, and shook hands in the sweetest manner.  My companion was for coaxing the little one into her lap, but she looked somewhat staggered when I reminded her that she would be trotting the colonel of the regiment on her knee.

Then more cavalry came, and more bands, playing a little the worst of any that I ever heard, and we impatiently thrust our heads out of the window, thinking, of course, the Sultan was coining, but he was not.  Then some infantry with white leggings and stiff knee-joints, with coils of green gas-pipe on their heads, like our student-lamps, marched by with a gait like a battalion of horses with the string-halt, and we shrieked with laughter.  Our friend said they called that the German step.  Germany would declare war with Turkey if she ever heard that.

By this time we were so tired and hungry and disgusted that we were about to go home and give up the Sultan when we saw no fewer than fifty men come toiling up the hill with carpet-bags, as if they had brought their clothes, and intended to see the Sultan if it took a week.  I do not know who or what they were, and I do not want to know.  They served their purpose with us in that they put us into instantaneous good humor, and just then there was a commotion, and everybody straightened up and craned their necks; and then, preceded by his body-guard, the Sultan drove slowly down, looked directly up at our window (and we groaned), and then turned in at the gate.  Opposite to him sat Osman Pasha, the hero of Plevna.  The ladies of the harem were driven into the court-yard surrounded by eunuchs, the horses were taken from their carriages, and there the ladies sat, guarded like prisoners, until the Sultan came out again.  He then mounted into a superb gold chariot drawn by two beautiful white horses, and he himself drove out.  Everybody salaamed, and he raised his hand in return as if it was all the greatest possible bore.