wives, or ladies of the harem (wives we were told), and several of the Sultan’s sons (mere youths) were there, beautifully apparelled.  We caught glimpses of the ladies through their carriage windows, and being women (though veiled) I should be surprised if they, on their part, did not get glimpses of us.  There were eunuchs too, black frock-coated—­and the chief eunuch, an important personage who ranks very high.  Then came the Sultan (Abdul Hamid) himself in an open carriage, closely surrounded and guarded by officers.  He was an elderly, careworn, bearded, sallow, melancholy looking man, whose features seemed incapable of a smile.  He entered the Mosque alone; his wives remaining seated in their carriages outside.  In the room in which we sat at an open window to view the ceremony we were regaled with the Sultan’s coffee and cigarettes.

The streets and bazaars of Constantinople were absorbingly interesting.  The various nationalities that everywhere met the eye; the flowing eastern costumes, the picturesque water carriers, the public letter writers patiently seated at street corners and occupied with their clients, the babel of voices, and yet an Oriental indolence pervading all, crowds but no hurry; the sonorous and musical sound of the Muezzin call to prayers from the minarets—­all was new and strange; delightful too, if you except the dogs that beset the streets and over which, as they lay about, we stumbled at every step.  They are now a thing of the past.  Poor brutes, they deserved a better fate than the cruel method of extinction which Turkish rule administered.

Of course we visited Stamboul’s greatest Mosque, S. Sophia.  Many other Mosques we saw, but none that approached the majesty of this.  One, the Church of the Monastery of the Chora, famous for its beautiful mosaics, we did not see, although the German Emperor had driven specially to it on his visit in 1898 to the Sultan.  The only good road Constantinople seemed to possess was this road to the church, which lies outside the city, and this road, we were told, was constructed for the convenience of His Imperial Majesty.

One day, on the bridge that spans the Golden Horn, we passed the Grand Vizier in his carriage.  It was the day on which we crossed the Bosphorus by steamer to visit Scutari on the Asiatic shore.  Scutari commands a splendid view of the city, the Golden Horn, and the Bosphorus in its winding beauty, right away to the Black Sea.  What a city some day will Constantinople be!  The grandest perhaps on earth.  In Scutari we heard the Howling Dervishes at their devotions, and the following day, in Constantinople, witnessed a performance shall I call it? of the Dancing Dervishes in their whirling, circling, toe-revolving exercise.  The object of both is said to be to produce the ecstatic state in which the soul enters the world of dreams and becomes one with God.  There is no question as to the ecstatic, nay frenzied state many of them attained.