The fortunate gentleman seems still to be regarding his escape with a broad grin.
If you were introduced to a polite Frenchman who had come straight from the guillotine, or to an affable American who had only just vacated the electrical chair, you would feel a faint curiosity about the whole story.

If a friend introduced somebody, saying, "My friend Robinson; his sentence has been commuted to penal servitude," or "My Uncle William, just come from Dartmoor Prison," your mind and perhaps your lips would faintly form the syllables "What for ?" But evidently, under Turkish rule, being hanged was like being knocked down by a cab; it might happen to anybody.
This is a parenthesis, since I am only dealing here with the superficial experience of the streets, especially in the snow.
But it will be well to safeguard it by saying that this unpolitical carelessness and comprehensiveness of the indiscriminate Turk had its tragic as well as its comic side.

It was by no means everybody that escaped hanging; and there was a tree growing outside the Jaffa Gate at which men might still shudder as they pass it in the sunlight.
It was what a modern revolutionary poet has called bitterly the Tree of Man's Making; and what a medieval revolutionary poet called the fruit tree in the orchard of the king.

It was the gibbet; and lives have dropped from it like leaves from a tree in autumn.
Yet even on the sterner side, we can trace the truth about the Moslem fatalism which seems so alien to political actuality.
There was a popular legend or proverb that this terrible tree was in some way bound up with the power of the Turk, and perhaps the Moslem over a great part of the earth.

There is nothing more strange about that Moslem fatalism than a certain gloomy magnanimity which can invoke omens and oracles against itself.
It is astonishing how often the Turks seem to have accepted a legend or prophecy about their own ultimate failure.