On hearing of my share in this adventure my mother was overwhelmed with grief and indignation. However, I considered that I acted quite rightly in the matter, and that in helping on the marriage of a suffering fellow-man, which subsequently turned out admirably, I did a piece of good work.
The end of the autumn of this year was approaching, and we prepared to transfer our residence from the country to our town-house. My uncle, who represented our town in the short-lived Ottoman Parliament in Constantinople, had returned from that city just at the same time, the said Parliament having been prorogued indefinitely by the present Sultan, and he had decided to reside in Angora for some time. Hearing all about my conduct, he asked my mother to send my luggage to his house, so that I might live among his own children, and pursue my studies under his personal supervision. My mother, whose gentle soul had been much disturbed by my countless misdeeds, instead of being glad to see me go away, when she might find a little peace, sobbed on seeing my luggage removed from her house. My uncle, as I inferred before, was the first man in our family to enter the service of the Government After acting as Judge in the quasi-religious Mohammedan Courts of Aleppo, Damascus, Cairo, Medina and Mecca, and other centres of the Ottoman empire, for nearly forty years, he retired temporarily from the Government service. Although thoroughly honest, sober, and pious in the extreme, he had fallen into some of the old failings and habits of Constantinople officialdom, such as polygamy. When I went to his house he had three wives, all living together with their numerous children and many female attendants, in his harem--that is to say, in the ladies' section of his house. His wives were all Circassians. He bought, emancipated, and married them at different times, and, unlike some other polygamists, he kept them in one house. It was as wonderful as uncommon to see how they all obeyed him implicitly; and though a man of the sternest disposition, he treated them all kindly and with perfect fairness. They may have hated one another at heart, but etiquette and a strict ceremony of precedence were always observed by them. The children of the different wives were more markedly jealous of each other than were their mothers. Before marrying these three Circassian wives my uncle had been married to a lady in whose lifetime he could not take advantage of the existence of the system of polygamy, because she was the daughter of a family of social distinction.