hans at night, men still tell stories of him as one of the great
hero-leaders of their race. These are the kind of stories that they
tell of the courage and the gentleness of this man who--while he was a
fine American scholar--yet knew the very heart of the Eastern peoples
in northwestern Persia as no American has ever done in all our
history.

"One day," says one old village Assyrian greybeard, "Dr. Shedd was
sitting at meat in his house when his servant, Meshadi, ran into the
room crying, 'The Kurds have been among our people. They have taken
three girls, three Christian girls, and are carrying them off. They
have just passed the gate.' The Kurds were all bristling with daggers
and pistols. Dr. Shedd simply picked up the cane that he holds in his
hand when he walks. He hurried out of the house with Meshadi, ran up
the hill to the Kurd village that lies there, entered, said to the
fierce Kurds, 'Give back those girls to us.' And they, as they looked
into his face, could not resist him though they were armed and he was
not. So they gave the Assyrian girls back to him and he led them down
the hill to their homes."

So he also stood single-handed between Turks and five hundred
Assyrians who had taken refuge in the missionary compound, and stopped
the Turks from massacring the Christians.

But even as he worked in this way the tide of the great war flowed
towards Urumia. The people there were mostly Assyrians with some
Armenians; they were Christians. They looked southward across the
mountains to the British Army there in Mesopotamia for aid.

But, as the Assyrians looked up from Urumia to the north they could
already see the first Turks coming down upon the city. Thousands upon
thousands of the Assyrians from the country villages crowded into the
city and into the American missionary compound, till actually even in
the mission school-rooms they were sleeping three deep--one lot on the
floor, another lot on the seats of the desks and a third on the top of
the desks themselves.

"Hold on; resist; the help of the British will come," said Dr. Shedd
to the people. "Agha Petros with a thousand of our men has gone to
meet the British and he will come back with them and will throw back
the Turks."

The Turks and the Kurds came on from the north; many of the Armenian
and Assyrian men were out across the plains to the east getting in the
harvest; and no sign of succour came from the south.

II

Through the fierce hot d