the open window, and, whilst sipping our coffee fell to gossiping.

"The room we sat in was reserved for Mirhi and Erminé. It was a quaint old room, filled with treasures collected by them in the bazaars of Stamboul. In one corner was a piano, on which lay scattered a pile of music and songs. The chairs were all low and softly cushioned with pillows, and on the tables inlaid with ivory were a profusion of flowers and books. Here we spent our day.

"In the evening, after supper, the father of Mirhi and Erminié joined us. His grave presence lent a solemnity to our conversation, which before his coming had been entirely absent from it.

"He is a very severe old man, with a manner so stern that his slaves tremble before him. He is much feared and but little loved by his children, for they dread his fierce temper, and hate the unquestioning obedience which he exacts from them.

"A silence fell on our little company. He sat on a low divan, his fez pushed back from his forehead, his shifty brown eyes following every movement we made, but never uttering a word, as he lazily sipped his coffee and smoked his chibook. Presently Erminé opened the piano, and, playing by heart, let her fingers wander at will over the ivory keys. Then Mirhi strolled over to her side, and, lifting their pure young voices together, they began to sing some of those passionate Western airs that move the soul of the listener.

"And we listened, the .old Pasha and I.

"Sitting in the dusk of that beautiful evening, with the low windows thrown wide to the evening breeze, and the waters of the Bosphorous murmuring an accompaniment to the music which they made, my heart was filled with vague longing. Again I was struck

by the distance dividing the West from the East, symbolized by the contrast betwixt the voluptuous music they had chosen and the orientalism that hedged in the lives of the singers. Not for them was the love of their song, not for them the freedom of that enchanted land over against the dim and distant horizon; not for them, nor, alas! for me, the joy of loving and being loved. "I was drawn from these painful musings by the Pasha's harsh voice.

"'Yes, as I always say, what pleases me most in my children's song is that I alone am privileged to hear it,-I alone of all men may enjoy it'; and he smiled in the cold moonlight.

"I could not answer. The cruel words breaking in on my thoughts almost made me cry, for they seemed to epitomize the whole of our grievance as slaves of the harem! But, turning to Mirhi, I was surprised to see her laughing. Taking me by the arm, she drew me towards the open window.

"I am tired of singing,' she said aloud; 'come and look at the moon.' Then leaning towards me, she whispered, 'Look there, under the window!'

"I looked, and I saw, close to the steps, a white caïque, and sitting in it, motionless, a foreigner, wrapped in the folds of a cloak! In one hand he held an oar idly balanced; the other rested familiarly against the wall of the austere old yali.

""Who is that?' I whispered in amazement.

“‘Only a fisherman,' answered Mirhi, laughing. 'I sing for him every evening at this hour.'

"And at that moment, shocked as I was, I was glad, dear friend, to know that after all her father was wrong, and that all the time he was being made to dance, and that to a tune of his naughty little daughter's own piping."

Talking to a Turkish gentleman of

my acquaintance, I quoted the above letter, saying that I could not bear that selfish saying of the old Pasha, that his daughters sing for him alone. To me it holds the Turkish woman-question in a nutshell, and is the apt expression of that oriental despotism under which they all must suffer. He spoke in French, and he answered me in that language,-"Madame, croyez-moi, ne parlez, pas ainsi à nos filles: ce ne serait pas la part d'une amie de réveiller en elles l'idée qu'elles sont malheureuses, et n'ont pas tous les avantages que Vous avez." How wilfully blind are these men, who will not see that they themselves do the mischief they would impute to us, by educating their girls up to the highest standard of Western learning, and giving them in addition free access to European literature of all kinds! What, after that, is there left for them to learn from their women? They are taught to be connoisseurs in wine and then are forbidden to taste it. How inconsistent! The sequel to Sadie's letter was not long in coming. "Mirhi has confided to me the whole of her little romance," she wrote. "Without telling me the name of her silent auditor in the white caïque, she has confessed that he is neither of her race nor creed, but is a naval officer attached to one of the French ships in port. I am terrified, as you can readily believe, at the audacity of my flighty little cousin, who, in spite of the rigorous surveillance that surrounds her, has contrived to captivate the attention, and perhaps even the heart, of this stranger. This is her story as she told it to me.

"I have known him since last spring ("known" is, of course, only a figure of speech, for we have never yet spoken to each other). He first noticed me in the course of our daily morning and evening walks. He often passed us on the quay in front of the old yali, and gradually we came to ex

changing signs: a turn of the head was enough for me, though he could see nothing of my features through my drawn veil. Last June I was out with my grandmother, and we left the carriage to go for a stroll. When we got into it again, behold a tiny unaddressed note in the place I had occupied. Quickly I slipped it out of sight: I guessed who it came from, for I had seen the interesting young stranger walking on the quay. It was a wonderful letter; but I didn't answer it. I even had the courage to destroy it up in my own little room. I received many more after that, always in the same way, until, finally, one day he wrote asking me to meet him alone at the Sweet Waters of Asia. I was frightened, and of course didn't go, and for days after that I avoided him; but the time came when I missed him. I longed for comfort and sympathy, so I wrote him a note, and the first time we saw him I dropped it from the passing carriage. I wrote to him that I never could meet him alone, but if he cared for music I would sing to him that evening and every night after at a certain hour! And I told him that in the songs I would choose would be the answer to his wonderful letters, so passionate and yet so respectful.'"

This letter of Sadie's indicated a very serious state of affairs, so, like the busy old woman that I am, I answered it by return.

"Dear Sadié,-Warn your foolish young cousin whilst there is yet time. This young foreigner is probably but a bird of passage, caring nothing for Mirhi, except in so far as the novelty of a flirtation with a veiled Turkish woman will help to while away the tedium of life on board ship in the Orient. Who knows that he is not already boasting of his conquest? 'Vous savez, j'ai une histoire turque sur les bras, une petite Orientale qui s'est toquée de mol.'

And is it for this that Mirhi would risk the happiness of her young life,— Mirhi so pretty and so innocent? Oh, tell her to be warned, naughty little flirt."

But when was Youth ever willing to be guided by Age? The end was as might have been expected. I read it one day in a few laconic lines of a paper; it was sadder even than I had expected:

The daughter of the Pasha has brought great trouble upon her family by running away with a foreign officer. She returned, indeed, after a few days, to her father's house, and was eventually forgiven by him; but the adventure was a terrible grief to him, and the disgrace of it he can never hope to outlive.

Who will deny that the father himself was primarily to blame?

One day I called unexpectedly to see Fathma and Sidi. Up to that time I had known them as two of the most highly cultivated women of my Turkish acquaintance, whose prettiness was well set off by the daintiness of the European-furnished boudoir in which they usually received. But to-day the haramlik was very untidy. Sidi was lolling on a divan reading a French novel, whose title, "Lèvres Closes," gave one an idea of its probable character. Fathma was sucking bonbons, but otherwise unoccupied. She had no stays on, but was dressed in a loose coat and skirt of European design. Her hair, parted in the middle, she had apparently not thought it worth while to do up, visitors not being expected, and it hung down her back in an untidy little pig-tail. When I came in she tried to roll it up, but was very unsuccessful. Her hands were dirty, and covered with ink-stains. Whilst I sat talking to them darkness came on,

and a little slave-girl crept in, fetched a lamp from a bracket on the wall, took it to pieces in the middle of the floor, filled it with oil from a can she had brought with her, lighted it and replaced it, all this in the drawing-room, and before a visitor! This little slave-girl was clothed in a pink flannelette dress which reached to the knee and gaped at the back, owing to its having shrunk in a washing it had received somewhere in the dark ages.

The slovenliness and sloth of Fathma and Sidi, when not "on parade," and the primitiveness of their domestic arrangements behind the scenes, seemed to me at that moment typical of the civilization of the country. True as the saying is, "Grattez le Russe et vous trouverez le Tartare," truer still is my version of the old proverb, "Grattez le Turque et vous trouverez le Barbare." The polish of the Turk is purely superficial, and immediately beneath it are the elemental passions and the primitive simplicity which distinguished the race in its barbarous beginnings.

We spoke as usual of the unhappy lot of Turkish women, on which subject they both had a great deal to say. Three things are, according to them, chiefly responsible for it: the spread of education, which is everywhere filling them with aspirations impossible to realize; the dying out of their own faith in the Moslem religion, which, depriving them of a belief in the world to come, makes them over-anxious for the happiness and amusements of this one; and finally, marriage with an unknown man, and the subsequent unreasoning jealousy of Turkish husbands, which sometimes leads them to make virtual prisoners of their wives, lest some other man should by chance enjoy a glimpse of their faces. Sidi and Fathma both agreed that no remedy to this state of things is to be expected from within. Only when Euro

peans begin to realize the existence of this white slavery at their doors will there be any chance of salvation for the unfortunate captives. For, of all things, a Turk prides himself on his "civilization," and the only thing that could induce him to alter his dealings with the women of his country would be the fear of ridicule cast upon that civilization in its expression towards them.

Above all, these two girls condemned the Moslem religion in its relation to their sex. They complained bitterly of it, declaring that plurality of wives was at the bottom of most of their troubles. They waxed furious on this theme, childishly declaring that Mohammed had only sanctioned four wives because he himself wished to enjoy fifteen! Poor maligned Prophet!

Pierre Loti makes his André ask the young trio, under whose spell he had fallen, whether they are not exceptional in their revolt against the established order of things, but they assure him of the contrary, and my experience leads me to agree with them:

Nous sommes la règle. Prenez au hasard vingt femmes turques (femmes du monde s'entend), vous n'en trouverez pas une qui ne parle ainsi!... Elevées en enfants prodiges, en bas bleus, en poupées à musique, objets de luxe et de vanité pour notre père ou notre maître, et puis traitées en odalisques et en esclaves, comme nos aïeules d'il y a cent ans! . . . Non nous n'en pouvons plus.

Sadié had been my greatest friend in Constantinople. She was so gentle and seemed so unhappy that I devoted much of my time to her, seeking to relieve the tedium of the quasi-captivity in which she lived.

Shortly after leaving Constantinople for good, I received from her the following pathetic letter:

"Yesterday, when you had gone and the last sad farewells had been spoken between us, I felt, for the first time in my life perhaps, that I could struggle no longer under a burden of such crushing hopelessness.

"For you are gone now, my friend, who alone understood me; you are gone, leaving my imagination thrilled with fresh longings for things for ever denied me, with fresh visions of scenes and countries to me for ever inaccessible, thanks to the inexorable law of my country, so beautiful and yet so cruel, which has decreed that we Turkish women shall be captives and the slaves of men's pleasure.

"Before you came, like a refreshing breeze from the dreamed-of West, my years flowed evenly: the very day before you appeared had, I remember, been peaceful and well filled. I had been reading; writing a few letters to friends dear and distant; and, whilst the light lasted, I had tried to paint the fugitive beauty of a handful of flowers. I worked quickly, fearing to see them droop and scatter their scented petals ere I had found colors sufficiently tender to fix on the canvas their evanescent charm. And whilst my fingers were at work, my thoughts wandered freely, and I hummed the refrain of a gay French air.

"Twenty years I had spent in my father's harem, twenty years I had idled in the high-walled garden that enclosed it, knowing nothing of life but what I gathered from books; and then you came, and from that moment all was changed. For even in that first hour I felt all the sympathy that came to me from you; I felt, though I could not explain it, the infinite pity that was in you. I sat at your feet, and I listened to all that you had to tell me of the wonderful West and the women over there.

"As I saw you, I learnt to appreciate the high life and whole purpose that

are at the command of every woman like you. Day by day I realized more of the length and breadth and width of your lives compared to the stifling limitatious of ours. Now I ain no longer content to read and to hear of those lives; I want to go out and live as you live, I want to be free as you are free, nay, loved and loving as you are! Oh, why did Fate make of me a Turkish captive, debarred from all that makes life worth living!

"You tell me that happiness is only a relative term, and that unhappiness makes itself at home in all climes and under all conditions. Too well do I realize that no one is safe from its heavy touch,-yet I would fain be free to fight it with my own two hands. Who would buy immunity from it at the price of clipped wings? who would sing in a cage rather than starve in freedom? What kills us in the harem is that, when sorrow finds us out, we are tied hand and foot and unable to fly from its cold embrace. We are there, face to face with it, helpless victims, fascinated by its malevolent gaze. We cannot go out and seek comfort in distraction or safety in flight, but must abide with the unbidden guest and harbor him until he chooses to depart.

"Last night after dinner I took up a book and tried to read, but it slipped from my hand, and I found myself musing over all these things: then, with an effort, I went to the piano, and would have sung as I do every -evening, but somehow was dumb. With my head in my hands I gave myself up to the sorrow of your loss, and -only when night came, and I was able at last to take refuge in the cold sanctuary of my own vast chamber, did I find comfort in tears.

“I am almost afraid, dear friend, of sending this letter. You will regret once more, as you have done in the past, having been the means of disturbing the -quiet tenor of my life by dangling be

fore me the immeasurable superiority of your lives over ours. Yet that knowledge must have come to me sooner or later from the Western books that we read, if not from our contact with the lives of Western women; and, in any case, it is too late to regret what has passed between you and me, for that wall of reserve which once kept us apart has been beaten down long since, and your Friendship is now the one thing that I value. The mere fact of it will remain to me a precious boon all through life."

This letter, as may be imagined, made me very unhappy, for it makes it quite clear that I was cruel to Sadié where I meant to be kind. If my coming but momentarily cheered her, and my going left her as sad as her letter implies, was I justified in thus intruding upon her life? Have I not made her more discontented with her lot, poor child? Have I not made her days seem more empty and purposeless? It is possible that it had been wiser and kinder on my part to resist the pleasure of so close a friendship with her when I saw where that friendship would lead us, and realized that, sailing from Constantinople back to the great world, as I now have done, her heart, which I left fluttering in its golden cage, must presently break against those very bars which I had taught her to feel, but had been powerless to break. Yet I meant it for the best. How, once having seen her, could I pass on without seeking a clue to the mystery lurking in the dark depths of her wonderful eyes, without making an effort to interpret their appeal?

Filled with these thoughts, I wrote to her, saying: "Take courage, my poor captive. The law of compensation exists all the world over, in an English home as in a Turkish haramlik, aud liberty doesn't always spell happiness. Unfettered freedom of action, unhin