The wheat crops are extraordinary; not only great in yield, but the grains often double the size of ordinary American wheat, as compared with specimens from the large and representative fields of Minnesota and Nebraska. TAXATION. But when this wheat is threshed out, the farmer cannot shovel it up and grind, or sell, or put it into bins; no indeed! He cannot take up a quart of it without permission from the government; for the government claims one-eighth of it as a tax,--it was always a "tithe" or tenth from the oldest historic times down to the present Sultan, but he raised the percentage to an eighth,--and it must stay on that exposed threshing floor, in rain or winds, or any sort of weather, till the tax-gatherer comes and measures it, which may be a week, or two weeks, or a month, and will be forever unless he is bribed to come. Nor is even this double tax all; the tax-gatherer is a tax farmer,--that is, he pays a lump sum to the government for the taxes of a district, and all he can get above that is so much profit to him; so if the grain on a threshing floor actually measures ten bushels, say, he will write it fifteen. After the farmer has paid first the tax on the land to the government direct, then the double, or rather treble, tax to the gatherer on the crops, more than half the income he can get from the land has gone to the government. I do not know an Armenian farmer who is not in debt; they work hard, but the products of their labor go to the government and the Kurds, and any one who complains is considered a revolutionist, and imprisoned or killed. The simple unvarnished truth is that an Armenian Christian has no rights of life or property whatever; and all he keeps of either (not very much) is what the regularly appointed officials or the self-appointed Kurdish fleecers choose to leave him.