the next morning, for I cannot remember what he means by "as such."

Dr. Christie knows how to handle women to perfection. We are a small circle, and he says that wives must share in the faculty meetings. He declares that he wants our opinion and our advice, and that "the very best example set to the Orientals is to show them how we respect and defer to our women." But I know this is only half the truth. He takes us in, so that we won't be able to criticize decisions in which we had no part. I knit in faculty meetings. My college education never destroyed the woman's instinct to have hands constantly occupied. Only, I sometimes forget and go ahead at my knitting mechanically. The first baby-band I made in faculty meeting was big enough to go around Herbert. So I called it a cholera belt and gave it to him. Orientals love to talk and talk and talk and talk. So do Occidentals. And in faculty meetings I have discovered that men are not a bit less garrulous than women. Since I committed matrimony I've found to my surprise that the other sex has very much the same failings as mine. This comes out in faculty meetings. I bet I'd find the same thing in corporation board meetings. Every one loves to talk, listens impatiently to others when they talk, watches for an opportunity to get another word, and gives in through weariness or indifference rather than through conviction. The best talker has it over the best thinker every time.

Mersina, January eighteenth.

I have written you about the Doughty-Wylies, how they stopped for lunch with us in Tarsus on their way from Konia, the summer British Consulate, to the winter Consulate at Mersina, and what joy it was for us to meet them. A few days later, a letter came with the inscription "For the Youngest Bride at St. Paul's College." It was a week-end invitation for Herbert and me. We went down to Mersina the very next Saturday. That was in October. Since then, week-ends with the Doughty-Wylies have been in a certain sense oases—you understand what I mean. The British Consulate means that world of ours which seems far away, and is missed occasionally in spite of the novelty of Tarsus life and the cordiality of the missionaries. At the Dougthy-Wylies, I am able to dress in the evening, and Herbert always looks best to me in his dinner-coat. We are unconventional until we get back into convention: then we wonder how and why we ever broke loose.

With tea served when you wake up, ten o'clock help-yourself-when-you-want breakfasts, a morning canter, siesta after lunch, and whiskey-and-soda and smokes in the evening—we are thirty miles only from Tarsus, and yet three thousand. We are back in an English country home. We can smell the box and feel the cold and fear the rain—so strong is the influence of the interior—until we step out-of-doors into the sunshine that makes us thankful, after all, that "back in England" was only a dream.

The Major is still in his thirties but has had a whole lifetime of adventure crowded into fifteen years of active service in India, Somaliland, Egypt, and South Africa. He has not been robust of late, and was given this consular post temporarily. Intends to return to active army service. Mrs. Doughty-Wylie is a little woman full of life and spirits. She loves nursing—has been after the bubonic plague in India and followed the British army in the Boer War. Frank and outspoken, you never know what she is going to say next. She is as vehement as the Major is mild, as bubbling over as he is cool, as Scotch as he is English. They are lovely to us, and as they have taken on with travel a sense of humor, we have great sessions, sitting around a log-fire until all hours of the night. The Major is keen on the Seljuk Turks. He is going to wean Herbert away from French to Ottoman history, I think. Plays up the possibilities of the field for research in glowing terms.

You can imagine how I whooped when Mrs. Doughty-Wylie wrote just after Herbert left that I "really must spend the time your husband is away with us." Socrates was brushing and cleaning Herbert's clothes, and an iron was on to press the trousers. I left them hanging on the line, with caution to Socrates to be sure to take them in that night. Suitcases were quickly packed. I took the next train to Mersina. Wouldn't you have done so to be able to wake the next morning at nine, and have a maid push back the curtains while you sipped tea and munched thin toast? Then, too, I hated everything about our quarters at Tarsus, cozy as they were, with Herbert away.

After a week of a lazy, restful relaxing, just as I was beginning to fell in the frame of mind to wonder how we ever happened to get out into this country and to feel sure that we would never come back, and when I was speculating on the mysterious phenomenon of the best of England's blood content always to live away from home, Herbert returned. I woke up one morning, and there he stood in the room, looking down at me. He declared that ten days in the Holy Land—without me—was enough for him. He had "done" Jerusalem and bathed in the Dead Sea—but Galilee could wait for another time. There was a swift Italian steamer up the coast. He saw it posted at Cook's in Jerusalem. Hurried down to Jaffa and caught it. We have decided that separations are not a success. May there be no more.

As we do not have to go back to Tarsus for two days, we are staying on to pass Armenian Christmas with the Doughty-Wylies. They are going to take us pig-sticking to-morrow.

Tarsus, 
January twenty-second.

To-day we rode across the Plain to the Cave of the Seven Sleepers.

I enjoy "training the Turks." They let their wives walk while they ride. Sometimes the poor woman will have a child or some other load on her back. You can imagine they do not turn aside to give a woman the path, not even a foreign lady. Sometimes I jar their sensibilities by standing my horse sturdily in their path. It never enters their head that I do not intend to turn out. When I rein up with the nose of my horse right in their face (they are generally on little donkeys) they have an awful shock. Reluctantly they give way to me, always looking injured and surprised. Sometimes they express their feeling in language that I fortunately cannot understand. I love to speak to them in English. I say something like this: "You old unwashed villain, I am sure you haven't used Pears' or any other soap this or any other morning. Hurry up, and get out of my way."

We came across a donkey standing patiently by the roadside. His halter-rope was tied around the leg of his rider, a boy who lay moaning on the grass. We had Socrates ask him in Turkish what the matter was. He responded that he had a fever and was too ill to go on. Herbert told Socrates to set the boy on his donkey. He went several miles with us, groaning all the way. We encouraged him, and fortunately soon met some people from his village. The Turks are absolutely indifferent to human suffering, and would have let him die there like a dog. Outside of large centers of population, they have no physicians, no hospitals, no medicines—it is only through the missionaries that such things are known at all.

At last we reached our mountain-goal, and climbed up to the cave. The Mullah received us cordially. Turks are polite and hospitable to travelers. I will say that for them. The Mullah's servant stabled our horses, brought us water, and allowed us to spread our lunch on the front porch of the mosque. It is a pretty little mosque, and right beside it