is a home for the Mullah built of stone. Both are close to the entrance of the cave. The group of buildings looked beautiful from the bottom of the hill. But as is invariably the case in Turkey, close inspection revealed the primitiveness and roughness.

After lunch, during which the servant and his little boy gravely sat and watched us, we went into the cave. We took our shoes off against our will, for the cave looked dirty and mussy. Down a long flight of stone steps the beturbaned guardian led us into a sickening atmosphere of incense and goatskin. We were told that the cave was large, but, as we were in stocking feet and had noses, we elected not to explore it. During the Decian persecutions, seven young men fled from Tarsus to this cave to escape. Here they fell asleep. They were miraculously kept asleep for one hundred years. Waking they thought it was the next day, and went down to a nearby village. They were surprised to learn that the whole world was Christian. This is the genesis, or at least the Oriental version, of the Rip Van Winkle story. The Christians built a shrine at the cave. The invading Mohammedan conquerors took it over and adapted shrine and legend to their own religion, as they have done with most Christian holy places.

We sketched the mosque in the afternoon. Then we sat looking out over the plain to the sea. It is great to have a chance to talk to one's husband. We are so busy during the week that we save up our talks for Saturday and Sunday, and we are just getting to know each other. The keeper told us through Socrates that his wife had died seven years before and that he lived there all alone, except for the Mullah, with his little five year old boy. The kid sang a song for us. We gave him slices of bread thickly spread with jam, which he ate with gusto. It was probably the first jam he had ever tasted—certainly the first Crosse & Blackwell's strawberry jam. After the feast was over, he crept up slyly, seized Herbert's hand, and imprinted on it a sticky kiss. We were saddled and ready to start homeward immediately after tea, but not soon enough to get away from the hail-storm that came up all of a sudden. Before we were out of the stable, the storm broke, great big hailstones that stung when they hit you. We rode hard for twenty minutes, enjoying it keenly. It rained just long enough to make the sunset richer and the air sweeter than usual. We do not mind a bit getting wet like that when we are on horse. By riding fast, the wind soon dries our outer garments and the rain does not penetrate. By the time we reached home, we were dry and did not need to change our clothes before dinner. After our exercise a good warm bath made us sleep like the pair of healthy children we are.

A VISIT TO ADANA

Adana, 
February eighteenth.

Dearest Mother:

You know how I love week-end visits. I used to put Uncle John's Christmas check into a hundred-trip ticket between Bryn Mawr and Philadelphia: so that if my allowance ran low I could get away from college over Sunday anyway.

Week-end visits here are really not had at all. There is no hotel in this town. Characteristically, Daddy Christie has the office force at the station pilot foreigners coming to Tarsus straight to St. Paul's College, no matter what orders they gave. A variety of folks wash up on our beach. A dignified professor with a little group of Oxford men bound for the interior to prove on the ground that there are villages back in the Taurus where ancient Greek persists unadulterated to this day, came back a few weeks later, faces beaming with the grin research scholars wear when they have it on the other authorities. Another group of men said they were travelers. Americans of the Far West they certainly were. We couldn't make out much else at first. Their leader sat next to me at lunch, and was so extraordinarily reticent, when, in trying to make conversation, I asked him about his family, that I commented upon it afterwards to Herbert and Dr. Christie. Later we learned that they were Mormon missionaries. Dear Dr. Deissmann, with others from the University of Berlin, spent two days with us on their journey in the footsteps of Saint Paul. He is gathering material for a book that will make a stir in the world. He spoke before the boys, in excellent English—what linguists Germans are!—and the college orchestra responded with Die Wacht am Rhein. It was a noble effort, and the Herr Professor was good enough to beam and applaud.

Week-ends would indeed be dull were it not for visits exchanged up and down the railway by missionaries in Mersina, Tarsus and Adana. A new person at any of the three stations is very soon invited to make week-end visits. Early in the autumn, Miss X arrived at Adana. When she made her first visit to Tarsus, Herbert and I invited her to have coffee in our study one Saturday evening. Kind of cosy, sitting in front of our fire, and she loosened up and told us that there was just one thing that troubled her in Adana. That was the Swiss teacher of French at the Girls' Boarding School, who said she was much relieved to find that the new-comer understood a little French, "Because, my dear, it is important for me to safeguard my English. You see I cannot risk catching your American accent."

Mother, I was mad as a hornet, and what I did proves that I am no good as a missionary. We told Miss X that when this petty persecution was being carried on, she was to be like B'rer Rabbit, and "jes' keep on sayin' nothin'." When the Swiss teacher came for a week-end, we invited her for coffee. As she settled herself before our fire, she said engagingly: "Now you must speak French with me. Take every chance you can for practice." "Thank you, Mademoiselle," I answered, "we should rather speak English. We are going to live in Paris, you know, and don't dare risk catching your Swiss accent." No, Mother dear, that wasn't like a missionary, was it? I am not sorry I said it. When I went to Adana, Miss X told me that the teasing had suddenly ceased after Mademoiselle's Tarsus visit.

Mrs. Nesbit Chambers invited me to spend a whole week with her. Herbert was to come over the following Sunday to bring me home. The train conductor who speaks passable French gave up to me his own private compartment. Some weeks since, I should have been aghast at the thought of going off all alone in Turkey and in Asia on such a queer train, with outlandish fellow travelers, to a place where I had never been. But things become familiar to one in a very short time. It seemed almost as natural as South Station, Broad Street, Grand Central, Trenton, Princeton, New Haven, Annapolis or Bryn Mawr—a year ago my whole world.

After the train pulled out of Tarsus, I felt that I had my nerve with me. But I was too interested in what I saw from the window to occupy my mind regretting that I had not waited until Herbert could come with me. The uncle of Krikor Effendi's bride (I mean the conductor) was most polite, and left me alone in his reserved compartment. At the first station an old brigand got off with a brilliant red tangled rug on his shoulder. I recognized it as the Cretan rug we had been bargaining for. Evidently he had not been able to get his price in Tarsus. A Turk on horse came up to meet the train. The horse jumped around so that his saddle turned. The man fell off safely, but his friends were still struggling to turn the saddle straight when we tooted on. At