ose villagers who, under threat of torture and
massacre, had apostatised, there was but yearning and sorrow, but never
a word of blame or bitterness. Sometimes there was a visit of Turkish
troops to search for concealed Russians, and, as our diarist remarks,
'We can't complain of the monotony of life, for we never know what is
going to happen next. On Tuesday morning we had a wedding in my room
here. The boy and girl were simple villagers.... The wedding was fixed
for the Syrian New Year, but the Kurds came and carried off wedding
clothes and everything else in the house. They all fled here, and were
married in the old dirty garments they were wearing when they ran for
their lives.... Their only present was a little tea and sugar that I
tied up in a handkerchief and gave to the bride.'

The eternal feminine and the eternal human speak there; and there, for
this gallantest of women, were two keys that locked up the endless
troubles and anxieties that ceased not day or night. But sometimes the
flesh was weak, and in the privacy of her diary she says, 'How long, O
Lord?' But for that there was the master-key that unlocks all wards, and
a little further on we read, 'One of the verses that helps to keep my
faith steady is, "He that spared not His own Son." For weeks we have had
no word from the outside world, but we "rest in Jehovah and wait
patiently for Him."'

The conditions inside the crowded yards grew steadily worse. Dysentery
was rife, and the deaths from it in that narrow space averaged thirty a
day. The state of the sufferers grew so terrible that it was difficult
to get any one to look after them at all, and many were lying in the
open yards, and the weather, which hitherto had been warm, got cold, and
snow fell. It was with the greatest difficulty that food could be
obtained for those in health, and that of a kind utterly unsuitable to
the sick, while in the minds of their nurses was the bitter knowledge
that with proper diet hundreds of lives could have been saved, and
hundreds of cases of illness avoided.

For the dead there was but a small percentage of coffins available, and
'the great mass are just dropped into the great trench of rotting
humanity (in the yard). As I stand at my window I see one after another
of the little bodies carried by ... and the condition of the living is
more pitiful than that of the dead--hungry, ragged, dirty, sick, cold,
wet, swarming with vermin. Not for all the wealth of all th