Weekly Expositor

An Empress in The Harem.

The Empress Victoria Augusta had in Turkey one experience not to be matched in any other place in Europe. To be received as a guest, but by men alone; to be entertained with perfect devotion, but exactly as if her host was a bachelor; to find not a single woman on the premises in any capacity, and then, after twenty-four hours of this kind of life, to be taken through a side door into a walled-up section of the palace, and there, in the midst of waiting women innumerable, and of unsurpassed magnificence, to be introduced to Madame the First Wife, Madame the Second, Madame the Third, Madame the Fourth, etc., etc., must of course impart a slight impression of limited hospitality to the flavor of the entertainment previously offered in the halls outside of the real household. This is what happened to the Empress of Germany. The impression produced by the passing glimpse of the real home of the Sultan was heightened by the fact that in Turkey etiquette forbids speaking to a man about his wife. The subject is very properly tabooed. The man who has fallen into multiple entanglements of the heart does not care to be addressed concerning them any more than he wishes to be talked to about any other weakness or failure of his life.

The ladies of the harem, says a correspondent of the New York Tribune, have had one revelation in this connection, even more startling to them than this opening of the harem door and the taste of its democratic life could have been to the Empress. The rumor that their Imperial master had taken the Empress on his arm, and had driven through the streets sitting by her side in his own carriage as no one of them could possibly do, was in itself sufficiently amazing. But to read in all the daily papers the account of the visit of the Empress without her husband to the city, when the Turkish sailors manned the yards of the fleet in her honor, and when salutes were fired for her sole benefit, was a most unexpected disclosure of the heights of dignity to which a woman may attain in some parts of the world. "Not one of the harem is known even by name to the nation, much less honored by the nation, as this stranger from Germany has been honored."