This new story in our series is about a people whose name you heard often during the Great War; perhaps you even sent some of your own pennies across the ocean to help them; for no one, not gallant little Belgium itself, suffered more in the war than did the Armenians. We sometimes think of them as the Belgians of the East, for their resistance delayed the advance of Turkish battalions, just as Belgium's brave stand prevented the first onrush of the Germans; and the Turkish revenge has been more horrible than the German. The bulletins of the Near East Relief Committee, which raised money for food and clothing and medicine and helpers in Western Asia, tell us how the Turks tried to annihilate the Armenians, and how, among the four million Armenians, Syrians, Jews, Greeks, and Persians who survived, four hundred thousand were orphans. In those first four months after the armistice, they were still dying every day, by hundreds, of starvation and disease, they were homeless and naked. Miss B. S. Papazian, an Armenian, has written a little book about her people, "The Tragedy of Armenia," in which she says: "The Armenians of Turkey to the number of about a million, old and young, rich and poor, and of both sexes, had been collectively drowned, burned, bayoneted, starved, bastinadoed, or otherwise tortured to death, or else deported on foot, penniless and without food, to the burning Arabian deserts." The whole story of their sufferings is too terrible for children to read; yet, American children are not willing to shut their eyes and ears to the sorrows of their brothers and sisters, whether in France or Belgium, or close at home in our American city slums, or far over seas in Asia Minor. I wonder how many boys and girls who read this letter, adopted a French orphan, or gave a little refugee a merry Christmas? And how many had a share in feeding and clothing and educating some little forlorn Armenian child? But this story of Archag, and his life at the missionary school, is not in our Schoolmate Series merely because Armenians are a persecuted people whom American children ought to love and to succor; it is here also because there are a good many Armenians in America, and more are coming, whose children will be American citizens in another twenty years. The Armenians, like our own Puritan forefathers, came here to escape religious persecution; so those of us who happen to be descended from the early settlers in New England ought to have a strong fellow-feeling for this other race of Christians who have suffered for the sake of their religion and have hoped to find religious freedom here with us.