ABSTRACT
Soon afterwards, we continued our walk, and paid a visit to a delightful palace with much scroll-work ornamentation, where the Viceroy's wives sometimes come and spend the summer. Little flowerbeds in the Turkish style, representing the designs of a carpet, surround this residence, into which we were freely 142allowed to go. The birds were not in the cage, and in all the rooms there was nothing more alive than the musical timepieces which announced each quarter of an hour by a musical-box tune from some French opera. The arrangement of a harem is the same in all Turkish palaces, and I had already seen several. There are always a number of little rooms surrounding the large halls. There are divans everywhere, and the only furniture consists of little tortoiseshell tables. Little arches cut into the wainscoting hold narghiles, vases of flowers, and coffee cups. Three or four rooms, decorated in the European Style, contain a few trumpery bits of furniture which would do honour to a porter's lodge; but they are only sacrifices to progress, the whim perhaps of some favourite, and none of these things is put to any serious use.
