“The first rise of my fortune, as you have probably heard from Murad, was owing to the scarlet dye, which I brought to perfection with infinite difficulty.  The powder, it is true, was accidentally found by me in our china vases; but there it might have remained to this instant, useless, if I had not taken the pains to make it useful.  I grant that we can only partially foresee and command events; yet on the use we make of our own powers, I think, depends our destiny.  But, gentlemen, you would rather hear my adventures, perhaps, than my reflections; and I am truly concerned, for your sakes, that I have no wonderful events to relate.  I am sorry I cannot tell you of my having been lost in a sandy desert.  I have never had the plague, nor even been shipwrecked:  I have been all my life an inhabitant of Constantinople, and have passed my time in a very quiet and uniform manner.

“The money I received from the sultan’s favourite for my china vase, as my brother may have told you, enabled me to trade on a more extensive scale.  I went on steadily with my business, and made it my whole study to please my employers by all fair and honourable means.  This industry and civility succeeded beyond my expectations:  in a few years I was rich for a man in my way of business.

“I will not proceed to trouble you with the journal of a petty merchant’s life; I pass on to the incident which made a considerable change in my affairs.

“A terrible fire broke out near the walls of the grand seignior’s seraglio.  As you are strangers, gentlemen, you may not have heard of this event, though it produced so great a sensation in Constantinople.  The vizier’s superb palace was utterly consumed, and the melted lead poured down from the roof of the mosque of St. Sophia.  Various were the opinions formed by my neighbours respecting the cause of the conflagration.  Some supposed it to be a punishment for the sultan’s having neglected one Friday to appear it the mosque of St. Sophia; others considered it as a warning sent by Mahomet to dissuade the Porte from persisting in a war in which we were just engaged.  The generality, however, of the coffee-house politicians contented themselves with observing that it was the will of Mahomet that the palace should be consumed.  Satisfied by this supposition, they took no precaution to prevent similar accidents in their own houses.  Never were fires so common in the city as at this period; scarcely a night passed without our being wakened by the cry of fire.

“These frequent fires were rendered still more dreadful by villains, who were continually on the watch to increase the confusion by which they profited, and to pillage the houses of the sufferers.  It was discovered that these incendiaries frequently skulked, towards evening, in the neighbourhood of the bezestein, where the richest merchants store their goods.  Some of these wretches were detected in throwing coundaks, or matches, into the windows; and if these combustibles remained a sufficient time, they could not fail to set the house on fire.