Mr. Neville Henderson, the British _chargé d’affaires_ at Constantinople, though certainly not pro-Turk, does not hesitate to criticise the Greeks. An ideal sense of balance for a diplomat. The Turks like Mr. Henderson; and when I remarked on the apparent anomaly that “one can be popular in Turkey without being pro-Turk,” I was met by the astounding retort that “he succeeds because he knows how to talk”—a strong argument against “silent” diplomacy! I can only hope that he may long remain at his post. Although he may not like to hear his beloved Foreign Office called a “mausoleum,” or the burial-ground for twentieth-century ideals. Of him, one can repeat what a Cabinet Minister once said of France: that “he is one of the few ready to give a criminal, or a genius, _his chance_.” Though not an enthusiast for any “Asiatic Revival,” he will accept the inevitable, and cheer the winner. May he stay at his post _at least_ till danger is past. * * * * * I have just made my first, and I hope my last, stay in Pera. The sister-in-law of my little Turkish sister is dying, so I cannot accept her hospitality, though she has begged me to come to her. What a terrible warning one can take from Pera! I had not realised the danger of losing oneself in the ambition to be truly cosmopolitan. These people belong to all nations and have the souls of none. Their faces have only one common feature—the lack of the spirit behind all racial types, the entire absence of any ideal. In Anatolia I found two forms of inborn honour: the “nationalist” and the “primitive peasant.” In Pera I stepped from Tokatlian’s Hotel to the Embassy with the feeling that someone is going to stab me in the back. * * * * * This is the fourth Christmas I have spent in Turkey. On the first occasion the Germans invited me to their Christmas Tree; outside some Armenians sang their exquisite native carols; which, like their folk-songs, make one wish their characters were equally fine. The concert, however, was interrupted by the master-scavengers of Constantinople, the innumerable dogs, against whose furious barking the Christians at first bravely held on. But the “enemy” trotted away to collect his forces from every quarter of the city and, in the end, I won a wager for the dogs _versus_ the Christians. Our entertainers went home, amidst a never-to-be-forgotten chorus of canine howling. In Constantinople the dogs certainly had their own nationality. Divided against each other by street feuds, the biggest troop coming from the “station beat,” where cans of rubbish are emptied from the Orient express, they yet _united_ to drive out the “alien” Christians from the fatherland of “Dogdom!” And so it is with the Moslems. If Albania and Syria have left their fatherland, it is not wise for a foreigner to utter a word against Turkey in their presence.