English liberality has already spent five thousand dollars, and the authorities gave reluctant consent to our coming up to distribute it. We located here at Semal, while the Turkish committee has its headquarters at Shenig, half an hour distant. It was evident that the thing to be first accomplished was the erection of houses, and only a few weeks remained in which it would be accomplished, so we set about persuading the people to begin preparing their walls for the timbers the government had promised them. "Of the survivors of the massacre (of 1894), five thousand have already gathered to try and reëstablish their old homes, while possibly another eleven hundred may still be scattered over the world. It is impossible as yet to give the exact number of the slaughtered, but it will probably be not far from 4,000. We feel that unless a different status from the present can be secured to distribute anything to these people beyond daily food, is simply to run the risk of its falling into the hands of the Kurds. We have distributed a good many tools, with which the people are gathering hay, in hope of having some animal to eat it during the winter. We should be glad to furnish them with tools for laying up the walls of their houses, and even pay the wages of masons to come and help them. It is all we can do now to prevent the people from fleeing again to the plain, when all their crops would go for naught." Near Harpoot eleven villages were compelled to accept Mohammedanism, and also near Van the entire population of two villages were forced to change their religion. Eight villages near Van were entirely depopulated. Most of the inhabitants were killed, and those who survived escaped to the snow-covered mountains, where they wandered with their children, naked and starving. The men who were forced to accept Mohammedanism were compelled to take their own sisters-in-law, whose husbands have been killed, to wife--a practice most horrible to the Christians, who hated polygamy. They were also compelled to plunder and kill their Armenian brethren to show that their conversion to Mohammedanism was genuine. The young maidens of these villages were carried into the Pasha's harem. The Kurds attacked the same villages over and over to make their work of destruction complete, and yet the Sultan ordered his ambassador in Washington to deny that there were any forcible conversions to Islam.