only the wonderful melons I have just spoken of, but pumpkins and squashes, lettuce and egg-plant, and indeed most of the vegetables that come to an American table. As to fruits, all that you know we know also, only of finer flavors. Asia Minor is the original home of the quince, the apricot, and the nectarine, and I believe of the peach too; while our apples, pears, and plums are incomparable. The Muscat apples of Amassia are exceptional even there. After eating them, one hardly wonders that Adam and Eve could not resist the temptation of doing the same, at the cost of innocence and Eden. The pears of Malatia keep them company; and the quince grows sometimes as large as a man's head. Another fruit equally important is the mulberry for silk-worms. The olive and fig are cultivated and also grow wild, and filberts and walnuts can be gathered anywhere in the woods, as well as orchards; of course not the American "hickory nuts," but the "English walnuts" of the groceries. In spite of the dreadful roads, and the lack of protection for travelers, the Armenians manage to send a good deal of grown or manufactured stuff to the ports on the Black and Caspian seas,--Trebizond, Batoum, Poti, Baku,--silk and cotton, and fabrics made from them; hides and leather, including lambskins; wine, dried fruits, raisins, tobacco, drugs, and dyestuffs, wax, and other things. Methods of cultivation are probably much like what they were in Abraham's time; there are no very modern machines or even tools. The plough is not quite the mere scratching-stick of the savages, to be sure; but it is only a crooked piece of wood with a bit of iron fastened to the end that touches the ground, drawn by oxen and held by the farmer. The fields of grain are reaped by the sickle as of old; it takes as long to cut down one acre so as fifty by a common mowing machine. The sheaves are carried to a gal or threshing floor near the house, an open platform, not sheltered from the weather; and there the grain is separated from the straw by a process so curious that I doubt if any American, save a missionary to Armenia, has ever heard of it. It is not treading it out under the feet of the cattle, as pictured in the Bible, nor beating it out with a flail; both these methods kept the straw whole. A threshing board is made by fastening hundreds of sharp flints into a wooden frame; the grain is placed between this and the threshing floor, the oxen attached to the board, and the farmer sitting on it drives them round and round in a circle until the straw is cut fine, and the grain well rubbed and shaken loose. Then, on the first windy day, he takes the old hand fan or winnow, and separates the grain from the straw, keeping the latter to feed the animals in winter; for the long grass of American plateaus, and the barns of hay from them, are seldom seen in Armenia.