If you doubt that there are horrible atrocities daily committed in Macedonia by Greeks and Turks alike, you need go no farther than Sofia. Visit the Orphanage for Macedonian boys established three years ago by Mr. Pierce O’Mahony, an Irish philanthropist, of Grange Con, County Wicklow. This gentleman was living in Sofia, and hearing terrible stories of massacres across the frontier, established an institution for the education of orphans whose parents had been killed in the raids. When I visited the place, I found it neat, orderly, and doing a most charitable and excellent work under the care of two English nursing sisters. In a large commodious house on the outskirts of the capital were thirty lads ranging in age from seven to fifteen, all dressed in their white woollen and black-braided national costume of Macedonia. When the boys were assembled in the large classroom, I heard some of their stories, and truly they were appalling, many of the details too terrible to be placed here on record. As an instance, one lad I saw, a bright, intelligent little fellow, was admitted to the Orphanage a few months ago. He lived in the district of Ochrida, and was one day tending his sheep as usual, when some Turkish soldiers came past. “Have you seen a Bulgarian band pass along just now?” they inquired. The lad declared that he had seen nobody. The soldiers doubted him, for the Bulgarian band in question was protecting the villages in that neighbourhood. [Illustration: Tziganes on the Isker road.] They asked again, and the boy denied having seen anybody, which was the truth. Whereupon one of the Sultan’s soldiers smashed the little fellow’s skull in with the butt end of his rifle, while another took a knife and cut his throat from ear to ear. They then dug a rough hole in the ground and buried him. Some hours after, a shepherd passing noticed that his dog was scratching the earth, and on going to the spot, heard moans. The lad was quickly exhumed, and found to be still living. For many weeks he was in the hospital in Salonica, but was eventually admitted to Mr. O’Mahony’s Home. When I saw him, the wound in the head had only just healed, and the ugly scar across the throat was still red. I have his photograph, but it is too ghastly to here reproduce. Another little lad described to me how his father and mother had been tortured by the Turks and afterwards burnt alive before his eyes, while another related how he had been captured by the Turks, taken into slavery, and afterwards escaped. Each orphan boy had his own terrible story to tell, stories that were full of horror and inhuman butchery, stories that made one wonder whether such things could really happen in this enlightened century.