"Then I would go, if I could, to America or to England, learn still more, and become at last a famous professor in some grand college in a Christian land." Kevork had already learned from a friendly priest, Der Garabed, to read and write Armenian, and to read Turkish in the Arabic character. For the Turks, and it is a significant fact, have never reduced their own language to writing; their books are printed either in the Arabic or in the Armenian character. He was in raptures when Jack offered to teach him English, which he promptly began to do, using as a text-book his father's Bible, the only book he had, with the exception of a Tauchnitz "Westward Ho," which happened to be in his pocket when he came to Biridjik. In return, Kevork taught him to read and write Armenian, and these lessons were shared by Gabriel and Hagop. Gabriel was a remarkably quick, intelligent boy, all life and fire; Hagop was quiet and rather dull, more at home at his father's loom than at his brother's book. Both used to listen delightedly to Jack, when, chiefly as an exercise for himself, he would translate some simple Bible story aloud in Armenian. Not that such were the only uses Jack made of his father's Bible. Outwardly his character still continued unformed, boyish, passive; inwardly it had begun silently to grow and to deepen. He did not act, but he thought a great deal. His mind was like a stream flowing underground, gathering volume as it flowed, and sure to emerge again to the light of the upper world. Its sources were fed by observation, memory, faith, and hope, and most of all by that matchless fount, not only of spiritual but of intellectual inspiration, the English Bible. Chapter V BARON MUGGURDITCH THOMASSIAN "Warbling still amidst the others, Wandering with them where they roam, And yet hallowing remembrance, With low gushes about home." No doubt some subtle form of nervous weakness, the relic of his long and terrible illness, still held young John Grayson in its grasp. Moreover the loss of his father, so intensely loved, had entered like iron into his soul. His mother's death was still, when he left home, a recent bereavement, and he was an only child. He had no near relatives except in his uncle's family, and even amongst them there was only one he cared for much, his father's godson, a cousin five years his senior, whose fag he had been at school. What had he, after all, to go back to in England? He excused his torpor with thoughts like these, whenever it occurred to him to ask himself if he meant to spend his life tending vines, teaching English, and studying Armenian, in a little out-of-the-way town on the banks of the Euphrates.