f consciousness awaiting me. I was
violently sick a moment later, and for nights and nights to come, I
experienced a horrible nightmare, in which all the terrors which might
have seemed natural to the situation laid hold upon me.

In the Grande Rue de Pera there was a cafe _chantant_ which was run by
one Napoleon Flam. There was a little silver hell attached to it where
there was a roulette table with twenty-four numbers and a double zero.
There were always plenty of flying strangers who were prepared to throw
away their money here, and I fancy that the fat Greek who presided over
the table made a fat thing of it. In the concert room, the superannuated
artistes of the poorer kind of Continental concert hall shrieked and
grimaced and ogled, and after every item of the show, the performer came
round with an escallop shell into which the more generously disposed
dropped small copper coins. The place was nearly always crowded with men
in black frock-coats and crimson fezzes. Ill-starred Valentine Baker had
been employed by the Sublime Porte to create an English _gendarmerie_,
and this fact had brought a large number of English military men into
Constantinople, who were anxious to enlist under his banner. Many
of them were men who had done good service in their day and held
unblemished records, but there is no disguising the fact that a large
contingent of the discredited riffraff of the British army was collected
in the city at that time. The "Concert Flam" was the accepted rendezvous
for both sets, and on my second night in Constantinople I went thither
in company with the young Irish-German officer, of whom I have already
spoken, and an American newspaper correspondent who had been in the city
long enough to know the ropes.

Young Von A. was a big, genial fellow, full of animal spirits, and on
this particular occasion, _Bacchi plenus_. He was under the impression
that all the little swarthy men who sat about him in their red fezzes
and their black frock-coats were Turks, He was boiling over with
enthusiasm for the Turkish cause, and he had picked up a patriotic
phrase or two. The spirit moved him to rise in an interval of the stage
performance and to bawl out aloud the words:

"Chokularishah Padishah," which, being interpreted, signifies, "May
the Sultan live for ever!" His enthusiasm was not contagious, for the
assembly consisted almost entirely of people who did not care a copper
whether the Sultan lived for ever or d