You must imagine, on one side of the dining-room table, the plump little bey, with his fez and glasses, quick little salutes each time he took a match or cigarette; facing him the tall, urbane Philip, in ineffable flannels or riding-clothes--for the embassy secretary is one of those who believe that clothes should express rather than blot out the inner man. Cigarettes--coffee--assurances to his excellency that the house is his, to Monsieur Le Directeur of our pleasure and profound consideration. Minutes pass, an hour--the bey knows no such thing as time, the other is as unhurried as he. The talk, in somewhat halting French, is of war, weather, French culture, marriage, those dreadful Russians, punctuated by delicate but persistently recurring references, on one side, to mattresses and food for the hostages, by the little bey's deep sighs and his "Mais ... que fairef" That "But what can be done?" like the Mexican's "Who knows?" fell like a curtain on every pause, it was the bey's answer to all life's riddles-- the plight of the hostages, the horrors of war, his own dream of being governor of a province close to Constantinople. One can hear him now through that cloud of cigarette smoke, "Mais--" with a pause and scarcely perceptible lifting of the shoulders--"que faire..." We went across to Lapsaki again that day to get blankets and buy or order mattresses, and found it much what Gallipoli must have been a few days before--sunshine and soldiers, camels loaded with stretchers and Red Cross supplies, the hot little twisting streets, noisy with traders and refugees. You can imagine the excitement over this mysterious stranger with an unlimited supply of gold lire and big silver medjidies, asking not what kind of blankets, but how many did they have, how long would it take them to make not one, but fifty mattresses! Greek traders, Jews from the Dardanelles, one or two hybrid youths in fez and American clothes, with recommendations from American Y. M. C. A.'s--it was a great afternoon for Lapsaki! A round-faced, jolly German nurse, dropped all alone in the little town by the chance of war, met us in the street, and later we went to her hospital. It had been started only a fortnight before, there were no beds, and the wounded lay on narrow mattresses on the floor. One man, whose face was a mere eyes and nose poking through patches of plaster, had been burned at Gallipoli. Another, up from the Dardanelles, had a hideous wound in his cheek, discharging constantly into his mouth. In spite of it he took Philip's cigarette and smoked it. He was dead when we came back three days later. On another mattress was a poor little brown bundle, a boy of twelve or thirteen, hit in the spine and paralyzed by a fragment of shell at Gallipoli and now delirious. Philip later took him back to Constantinople, to the X-ray and care that might save his life.