The gentleman from Chicago, at whose instigation I had gone out to Turkey, had supplied me with a sum of forty pounds, and had undertaken to deposit more to my account at the Ottoman Bank. I called at that establishment daily and found news of no remittance. I was in the meantime vainly moving the Turkish authorities for a _teskerai_, which would authorise me to go up country. No remittance, no leave to move, the hotel bill growing to really alarming proportions, the outlook was unpleasant; in a while it had grown no less than desperate. I bombarded the Chicago man with cablegrams as long as I could afford it, but no answer came, nor have I, from that day to this, received any explanation of the circumstances which induced him to send me out and then to leave me stranded. I had already made application to the British Consul, Mr Fawcett, afterwards Sir John, to secure for me a passage home, when I was delivered from my embarrassments by as remarkable a chance as ever befell me in my life. After leaving the Consul's office, I strolled into the Valori gardens, which were a dreary waste of small pebbles and coarse gravel, with an oasis here and there consisting of a painted iron table and a few painted iron chairs, where men of all nationalities sat sipping vishnap and limoni, and extinguishing by their Babylonian chatter the strains of a very indifferent band. I was making the circuit of the gardens in tolerably low spirits; I had expended my last piastre, had emptied my cigar-case, had listened to a violent objurgation from the landlord of the Byzance Hotel and was now bound home at the expense of the Consular funds--a failure confessed. Nobody likes to be beaten, and it seemed to me at that moment that I tasted the full flavour of ignominy, and whilst I was floundering in the depths of my despondency I heard a voice speaking in English. "There you are--the _Weekly Dispatch_--Constantinople in a state of siege. If I could find the man who wrote that article, I should like to commission him to-morrow." Now it happened that I had written that article and had sent it home within a day or two of my arrival. I had not even known that it had been accepted and the revival of hope ran through me like an electric shock. I claimed the article for my own and in ten minutes I had concluded a bargain with the authorised agent of the _Scotsman_, had agreed to accept the services of an interpreter, and had arranged, with a _taskerai_ or without one, to take the 7.30 train to Adrianople from the Stamboul station. There followed a hurried interview with the Vice-Consul, Mr Wrench, at which it was arranged that my hotel bill should be defrayed from future earnings, my baggage was released by the Consular influence, and next morning, at the appointed hour, my dragoman and I were being pulled across the waters of the Golden Horn by a pair of sturdy _caiquejees_, and were bound for the front. With what a rebound of high spirits on my part it is quite impossible to say t I thought I had never seen so beautiful a morning, and indeed the scene, apart from all considerations of mood, was very charming. The receding hill of Galata, with its bowers of green, its mosques and minarets and palaces, lay steeped in the early sunrise, and looked as lovely as a dream.