Their life was quite horridly dull, they declared, as we sat drinking coffee and eating sweetmeats. When I agreed with them, however, that it must be dull, they both laughed merrily. Dull though it might be, it was evidently well worth living. Besides, it was not going to be dull very long, the elder of the two assured me in a whisper. Then, as if struck by a sudden thought, off she rushed, taking her sister with her. When a moment later they returned, they were hooded and clothed from head to foot, the one in pale blue satin and the other in bright rose; while the one as the other had before her face a little black veil, that flew about in the most bewitching fashion.

They were in a flutter of excitement: their eyes seemed larger than ever, their colour more brilliant. They were going to take me for a little stroll they said; they had something to show me.

An old Turkish servant who was with them glanced at me doubtfully as they spoke. Evidently she did not approve of the expedition.

Heedless though they might be at home, these Turkish girls were keenly alive to what was decorous abroad; for, as we left the house, their whole demeanour changed in the twinkling of an eye they became as grave and demure as nuns. They did not speak one word; they never even raised their eyes from the ground as they walked along at a funeral pace by my side. They led me away from the soldiers' quarters towards a little white tent, before which a tall handsome Turkish officer was standing, as if carved in stone. Although we passed straight before him, no salutations were exchanged; he never moved even a muscle, indeed never gave even a glance in our direction; nor did my companions give a glance in his. The elder of them took my hand, however, when we had left him well behind; and with the prettiest little gesture placed it over her heart.

'Feel how it beats,' she whispered. He is my fiancé. The marriage will be soon.'

She was all aglow with happiness, all aglow with love too; yet, as she explained to me, she had never heard the sound of this man's voice, he had never even touched her hand.

They chattered and talked more than ever, when we were safe indoors again; and when I wished to say good-bye tears came into their eyes. They had hoped that I should stay with them for a week at least, they said; and they appealed to their father, when he came in, to persuade me to stay.

This he refused to do, however, with many courteous apologies. If later I would pay his daughters a visit he would esteem it a high honour, he said; but, for the time being. . . . Evidently his one wish was that I should stand not on the order of my going, but go at once. And a few minutes later I knew that he had good reasons for his wish.

To reach the frontier we must pass through the midst of the soldiers, who were still standing about in groups; and no sooner did they see us than they raised an odd sort of growl, which I did not like at all-it made me think of wolves. They were evidently very angry indeed by this time; and had it not been too manifestly absurd, I should have said that they were angry with me. As we drove past, they scanned me over in the strangest fashion, or so at least it seemed to me; some of them with scornful indignation in their eyes, others with fierce bitter wrath. And all the while the very air was alive with what sounded like the Turkish for Englishwoman.

The Commandant became whiter even than before, I noticed, and more anxious. Never a sound passed his lips until the little river that marks the frontier was reached. Then he heaved a sigh of relief, such as in my life I had never heard. It was as if he had suddenly been freed from some burden almost too heavy to be borne.

It was not until later that the whys and wherefores of the fashion in which the Turkish soldiers demeaned themselves that

day were made clear to me. Just before I arrived at the encampment the news had come, it seems, that the Sultan had yielded to England in the Sinai Peninsula question; and that therefore there would be no war. And these soldiers had been led to believe that war was as sure as death, close at hand too; and they were craving for war. For war is to them at all times as the breath of life; and in war, at that time, lay, as they knew, their one chance of ever seeing the pay for which they had long been clamouring; their one chance, therefore, of having quite enough to eat, quite enough wherewith to clothe themselves.

EDITH SELLERS.

A SIDELIGHT ON YOUNG TURKEY.

HUSNEYA was my first friend. She was a very charming person, small, fair, with silky light-brown hair parted in the middle; and her perfectly shaped face resembled a little Greek Aphrodite I once saw in a museum at Pisa. She was the wife of Ali Bey, the military governor of a far-off Asiatic province, and as her husband was a 'Young Turk' who hated ostentation and shams of any kind, she trusted to the natural beauties of her complexion, eschewing the rouge and powder affected by some of her countrywomen, and her slim hands were unadorned. The type of Turkish lady with whom European women travelling in Turkey usually become acquainted is either a daughter or wife of a rich Pasha, ordering her gowns from Paris, reading French novels and aping European fashions; or latterly, perhaps, one of the most advanced leaders of Feminism, such as Halide Hanum, who writes for the daily papers, and is a leading spirit in Turkish educational matters. Husneya was none of these. She was just a soldier's daughter and a soldier's wife. The luxury of a European governess had not been hers, and except for the companionship of an enlightened and intelligent husband she had had little education save that of travel and experience.

Husneya had been married at sixteen to Ali Bey, ten years her senior and then a captain in a cavalry regiment in Macedonia. Husneya lived with her mother and aunt in Constantinople, and there Ali, hiding in the ilex trees beside the 'sweet waters of Asia,' had obtained a clandestine glimpse of his future bride. Beside that cool creek of the Bosphorus, Husneya, after the Turkish fashion, had been used to wander on warm spring days with her young friends, abandoning in part the conventions of the town for the welcome freedom of the country, with unveiled face and hair only concealed by a soft gauze scarf. As the girls talked and laughed together Husneya passed close to Ali's hiding-place, and he loved what he saw and determined she should be his wife. The betrothal took place, arranged by the parents; but Ali did not see her again for a year, as his military duties made it impossible for the marriage to take place. During this time they were allowed to correspond; and so, before they had met, they had formed a sound basis for that mutual friendship which has followed twelve years of marriage.

Colonel Ali Bey was a 'Young Turk 'who had played a prominent part in the Revolution of 1908. His experiences up to the Declara

tion of the Constitution had been purely military and he had gained the reputation of being a strong and able man. ('Ali Bey is a small man,' said my thoughtful friend Major Rechid Bey, who introduced me by letter, but there is more strength of character in him than in many of us who are twice his size.') Young, honest and of an amazing energy, he was obsessed by the idea of regenerating Turkey, and was now in process of governing a province which shortly before had been devastated by one of those appalling massacres that, alas! have recurred so frequently in those parts of the Turkish Empire. The members of different races and creeds, each of them ignorant and fanatical, live together in strained tension till some untoward influence or impulse rouses the sleeping ferocity of the dominant race. Then, urged on by greed, and encouraged by religious fanaticism, they rise, slay and burn. The full tale of the terrors of the massacre cannot be told. To this province, its wounds still gaping, came Ali Bey and Husneya his wife, bringing with them the spirit of the reformer, the spirit of hope. The difficulties of the situation can hardly be imagined-on the one hand, the most extreme fanaticism of Islam outraged by the very idea of administering equal justice to Moslem and Giaour-on the other, the Christian population, too long oppressed to be capable of any confidence in a Turk, be he young or old. The Christians regarded his attempts with suspicion, the Moslems nicknamed him the 'Giaour Vali' and put every obstacle in his path. The new Governor found himself practically alone-his subordinates either new to their work, or else servants of the old régime, always alert in mischief-making-and it was only by controlling everything himself that he could get any measure of law and order carried out; but, half by persuasion, half by firmness, he gradually gained the confidence of the Christians, who regarded him as some queer freak, so little accustomed were they to such treatment. In this work of pacification Husneya helped him. It is an error to suppose that woman in the East is a nonentity; her influence reaches far beyond the walls of the harem, and for good or bad she may move the destinies of province or even empire. Not only by continually bringing before him cases of oppression which came to her ears and urging her husband to a greater pity, but by her own sympathy with all suffering, she won the hearts of rich and poor, Turk and 'Giaour.' Perhaps she sometimes shocked the old-fashioned Turkish ' hanums' by her up-todate ideas from Salonica; but they soon forgave her, for the sake of the brightness she brought into their lives, the school she started for their daughters (itself a daring innovation in those parts), where the

girls learnt French and English, sewing and embroidery, and, better still, a sense of moral responsibility and self-respect. But the Christians adored her. There has never been one like her,' Eygul, my Christian handmaiden and interpreter, assured me. We all love her; she is quite different from some of the Turkish ladies we know, she speaks gently and not roughly to us, and we know that she is our friend.' She was a familiar figure on the Relief Committee, which met once a week, and showed a business capacity in deciding the market value of the work done by the survivors of the massacre. Best of all, she helped to spread around her a more liberal spirit, the spirit she had imbibed from Ali, in the early days of their marriage, and later from the wives of Ali's friends and fellow reformers; and she strove earnestly to break down that web of prejudice and ignorance by which the folk of that far-off Asiatic city were being choked.

Husneya and I were fast friends the first day we met. I had the good fortune to come with an introductory letter from Major Rechid Bey, Ali's intimate friend, who, Husneya afterwards cheerfully informed me, 'loved me with a friend's heart and not with a bad eye,' and so I had the advantage over the mere curious traveller, casually introduced by a consul or a missionary, who, though always hospitably received, would not have been met with the same delightful cordiality and absence of restraint that greeted me. 'Do not let your soul be squeezed,' Husneya said to me-a picturesque way of begging me to make myself at home-while Ali remarked in an encouraging way, 'One feels a little awkward the first day in a strange house, but one soon gets used to one's new surroundings.'

Though I could only converse with Husneya through the medium of an interpreter, who was either her husband, a fluent French scholar, or Eygul, the Christian girl, who talked a strange English learnt at school in Beyrout, we understood each other from the outset with a quickness born of a mutual trust. We are friends, we do not need to speak,' she told one who expressed surprise at the pleasure we derived from each other's company; and, in truth, the way of words is but one of many roads by which the human spirit can communicate with its fellows. How often has it not happened to one to talk and talk to a companion and friend, and at the end to feel that the gulf of misunderstanding had only been widened, not bridged? I hardly realised the lack of a common language; for is it not true, as the poet says, that 'Love is the one way to know or God or man,' and Husneya and I loved each other. Still, talk we did, sitting on the divan that ran round the room. Husneya had a 'salon' with chairs and sofas stiffly arranged to receive visitors,