He knew it by heart, but to him it always possessed a contemporary and news interest.
"Here is a review of the history," he would say--he always referred to it as "the" history--"that I came across in my TRANSCRIPT." In the eyes of Doctor Gilman thirty years was so brief a period that it was as though the clipping had been printed the previous after-noon.
The members of his class who were examined on the "Rise and Fall," and who invariably came to grief over it, referred to it briefly as the "Fall," sometimes feelingly as "the....

Fall." The history began when Constantinople was Byzantium, skipped lightly over six centuries to Constantine, and in the last two Volumes finished up the Mohammeds with the downfall of the fourth one and the coming of Suleiman.

Since Suleiman, Doctor Gilman did not recognize Turkey as being on the map.
When his history said the Turkish Empire had fallen, then the Turkish Empire fell.

Once Chancellor Black suggested that he add a sixth volume that would cover the last three centuries.
"In a history of Turkey issued as a text-book," said the chancellor, "I think the Russian-Turkish War should be included." Doctor Gilman, from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, gazed at him in mild reproach.

"The war in the Crimea!" he exclaimed.