nd me to your Imperial
Master, my brother. Tell him that, when I am gone, he
may have Constantinople, provided only"--and a certain
slyness appeared in the Sultan's eye--"that he can get
it. Farewell."

The Field-Marshal, majestic as ever, gathered up the
manifesto, clicked his heels together and withdrew.

As the door closed behind him, I had expected the little
Sultan to fall into hopeless collapse.

Not at all. On the contrary, a look of peculiar cheerfulness
spread over his features.

He refilled his narghileh and began quietly smoking at it.

"Toomuch," he said, quite cheerfully, "I see there is no
hope."

"Alas!" said the secretary.

"I have now," went on the Sultan, "apparently but sixty
minutes in front of me. I had hoped that the intervention
of the United States might have saved me. It has not.
Instead of it, I meet my fate. Well, well, it is Kismet.
I bow to it."

He smoked away quite cheerfully.

Presently he paused.

"Toomuch," he said, "kindly go and fetch me a sharp
knife, double-edged if possible, but sharp, and a stout
bowstring."

Up to this time I had remained a mere spectator of what
had happened. But now I feared that I was on the brink
of witnessing an awful tragedy.

"Good heavens, Abdul," I said, "what are you going to do?"

"Do? Why kill myself, of course," the Sultan answered,
pausing for a moment in an interval of his cheerful
smoking. "What else should I do? What else is there to
do? I shall first stab myself in the stomach and then
throttle myself with the bowstring. In half an hour I
shall be in paradise. Toomuch, summon hither from the
inner harem Fatima and Falloola; they shall sit beside
me and sing to me at the last hour, for I love them well,
and later they too shall voyage with me to paradise. See
to it that they are both thrown a little later into the
Bosphorus, for my heart yearns towards the two of them,"
and he added thoughtfully, "especially perhaps towards
Fatima, but I have never quite made up my mind."

The Sultan sat back with a little gurgle of contentment,
the rose water bubbling soothingly in the bowl of his pipe.

Then he turned to his secretary again.

"Toomuch," he said, "you will at the same time send a
bowstring to Codfish Pasha, my Chief of War. It is our
sign, you know," he added in explanation to me--"it gives
Codfish leave to kill himself. And, Toomuch, send a
bowstring also to Beefhash Pasha, my Vizier--good fellow,
he will expect it-