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 CHAPTER XIV

ALI BABA, MY CAÏQUE-TCHI

Our return journey to Constantinople was uneventful. There we found our mother, who had decided to spend the winter in the town and not on the island. I was not supposed to be well enough yet to resume my studies seriously. My brother left us shortly for Europe again.

It would have been a dreary and miserable winter for me, away from my home and the country, separated from my playmates and cooped up in small city rooms, with only buildings to look at on all sides, had it not been for a discovery I made. By accident I stumbled upon a big volume of Byzantine history, a history, till then, practically unknown to me.

As page after page gave forth its treasures, my interest in the people of which it wrote increased, and loneliness and boredom departed, not to return again that winter. After I finished the book it came over me that all these marvellous things I had been reading about had taken place yonder, at Stamboul, half an hour from where I sat. Instantly the