all precautions. He certainly earned his reputation; he seemed to have been born with the fear of brigands in his soul; mere conversation about them caused him to break out into a profuse perspiration. He had talked to us very seriously on leaving Constantinople, as we sat on the deck of the steamer which took us across the Sea of Marmora on our way to Brusa.

"Pour l'amour de Dieu, mesdemoiselles, soyez secrètes; la secrécé, c'est tout."

"La secrécé" became his by-word. If there was one thing he was more afraid of than anything else on earth it was X's surname. He implored her not to use it, but to call herself Miss Victoria. He had all our luggage labelled Miss Victoria; and if in casual conversation the dreaded name leaked out, beads of perspiration rolled down his face and he would glance nervously round to see who was within earshot.

X was rather a reprobate on the subject. On our arrival at Madame Brot's well-known hotel at Brusa, from where we were making our final departure the next day, she marched up to Madame Brot and said, "I think you know my uncle"—mentioning him by name. Calphopolos, who was just behind, explaining that our name was Victoria pure and simple, turned green with horror. With bent back and staring eyes, shaking the same finger in warning which his subconscious self was trying to put on his lips, he endeavoured to attract X's attention from behind Madame Brot's broad back. But X went glibly on, quite oblivious of the panic she was creating. Calphopolos turned to me with the resigned expression of a man on whom death-sentence has been passed. "It is all over now," he said, "everybody in Brusa will know about us in half an hour. Mesdemoiselles, did I not implore you for the love of God to respect the secrecy? Ah, mon Dieu, mon Dieu, quelles demoiselles!"

And then poor old Calphopolos, who was not without his sense of fun, laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks. "The only thing left to do," he went on, when he had sufficiently recovered to speak again, "is to pretend we are going to Angora and put them off the scent. Mesdemoiselles, for the love of God please try and remember that it is Angora you are going to. Tell everybody you are going to Angora. The secrecy it is everything."

It must be confessed it was very difficult at that time to feel seriously alarmed about brigandage, for we seemed to be moving in ordinary respectable society, and Calphopolos's treatment of the subject merely caused us to think of it as a joke. Still, we fully realised that it was a real risk, against which it would not do to neglect taking ordinary precautions; and this sense was heightened by the extreme alarm of the Vice-Consul at Brusa to whom we applied for the escort of Zaptiehs, without whom one is not permitted to travel in Turkey with any guarantee of safety. He could not understand why we would not drive through to Nicæa in a landau in one day, like the ordinary tourist; this, with a suitable escort, made the journey quite safe, and it is a common thing for travellers to do. But to ride there in three days with our camp, sleeping on the way, was another matter. Every extra hour spent loitering in any one district heightened the risk of being attacked by brigands. X tried to explain that it was for the sake of her health, which only made him more bewildered; surely a landau was more suitable for invalids!

Finding us, however, unmoved by his arguments, he promised to send us two men the next morning and implored us never to leave their sides for a moment. He must have rubbed the same instructions well into the Zaptiehs, for during the seven days which they accompanied us as far as Mekidje on the Anatolian Railway, they never were more than a couple of yards away from us, day and night. This certainly detracted from the sense of freedom we were otherwise experiencing. It seemed at first as if we had only escaped from one form of bondage to fall into another. But the fact that the men were unable to speak any language we understood prevented it from becoming irksome, and one was soon able to become nearly oblivious of the clanking sword at one's elbow.

Calphopolos, however, was not so easily ignored. He had a sort of feeling that we were always running away from him, and tried to check this pernicious tendency on our part by engaging us in constant conversation in his broken French. The more we edged our horses away from his side and tried to put a silent Zaptieh between him and ourselves, the more persistently would he pursue us, propounding some new problem which required an answer. Our behaviour on breaking camp that morning had probably given rise to his state of mind. We had ordained that the start should be made at eight o'clock; but the usual procrastinations had ensued and the men seemed totally unable to get off. Calphopolos kept packing and unpacking his little bag in search of the missing tooth-brush, and tried to keep us calm.

"It is thus in this country, mademoiselle; have no anxiety—we shall go, we shall go."

X and I agreed that there was only one way to go. We had our horses saddled and rode away, in spite of Calphopolos's prayers and entreaties to wait till the whole camp was packed. The Zaptiehs, after the orders they had received, were obliged to ride after us. This left Calphopolos and the muleteers without Government protection, which so filled them with terror that in a very few minutes they also were on the way. Calphopolos came tearing down the road after us, the tails of his long black coat flying out behind, the tooth-brush sticking out of his pocket, and the perspiration rolling down his cheeks.

"Pour l'amour de Dieu!" he gasped as he caught us up, "pour l'amour de Dieu!" and then he had so much to say that he couldn't say it and relapsed into laughter and ejaculations of "Mais quelles demoiselles, mon Dieu, quelles demoiselles!"

The second day our road lay across the great Jenishehr plain. Herds of buffaloes strayed about on the wilder parts, and here and there fields of corn and tobacco, suddenly springing up beside the stretches of rough grass, signalled the approach to an occasional village.

Here also it was very difficult to think of brigands; the harmless look of peaceful cultivators did not suggest them. Besides which the country was so open that you could not be suddenly pounced upon; you would have ample opportunity of considering evil-doers as they approached you across the wide plain.

We encamped that evening near the small village of Jenishehr. The excitement of the novelty had worn off and we had had a long day in the open air. In consequence of this I had fallen into a profound sleep at once on going to bed. Suddenly I was awakened by a noise in the tent, and looking up distinctly saw the figure of a man coming cautiously through the tent door. In one moment I had hold of my revolver, kept loaded at the head of my bed, and had it levelled at him, wondering when the psychological moment for pulling the trigger would occur and whether I should manage to live up to its requirements.

"Pour l'amour de Dieu, mademoiselle! pour l'amour de Dieu!" came in a terror-stricken voice.

I put down the weapon rather crossly.

"What do you want?" I said.

"Quels sont vos noms," stuttered out Calphopolos in great agitation.

"What on earth do you mean?" I said; "you know our names well enough."

"Pour l'amour de Dieu, quels sont vos noms," he repeated.

"X," I called out, "wake up and tell me what is the matter with Calphopolos—I think his head has been turned by this fright about your name; he is going about jibbering over it."

X had a soothing influence on Calphopolos, and gradually extracted from him that the local Zaptieh had come up for our tezkerehs and wanted to know our names. His agitation over the revolver had been so great that he had been unable to explain articulately that it was our tezkerehs that he had come for.

The next day the whole character of the country changed. The plain gradually oozed away into a more