The Powers of Darkness are all abroad, They own no Saviour, they fear no God; And we are trembling in dumb dismay-- Oh, turn not Thou Thy Face away!" --_Cameronian Midnight Hymn._ If the Armenians were safe, for the present, in their own Quarter from actual murder, it was the most that could be said. They dared not stir an inch beyond its boundaries; and within it, the Redifs who were quartered upon them, ostensibly as protectors, but really as spies, committed many horrible outrages. They were continually pressed to surrender firearms, which they did not possess. To satisfy the authorities, any pieces that could be found by diligent search amongst the few who had dared to conceal them, were given up; and this, much to his regret, was the fate of Jack's revolver. Still the Turks persisted in the assertion that the Armenians had a large number of Martinis, supplied to them by foreigners, and that these must be produced before they could promise them security for their lives and their possessions. Vain were their protestations that these Martinis had no existence--that they had never even heard of them. In the end, the persecuted community actually _purchased_ arms from the Turks themselves, which they then gave back to the Government. This might appear at first a mere trick of the officials, to secure a trifle of dishonest gain. It was much more; it was part of the subtle, skilful, elaborate plan by which a net was drawn around the doomed race, and they were made to appear, in the eyes of those who might have befriended them, as the doers, not the sufferers, of violence. In a European newspaper, English or German, the transaction might have read thus: "At Urfa, a town on the Euphrates (_sic_), a disturbance was caused by the Armenians, who attacked a party of zaptiehs as they were conveying a prisoner to the guard-house. They overpowered the zaptiehs, and killed the prisoner, against whom they had a grudge. Some rioting ensued; shops were plundered, and several persons, both Mussulmans and Armenians, were killed. But the Armenians having surrendered their fire-arms, and being restricted, for the present, to their own Quarter, order and tranquillity have now been completely restored, through the firmness of the Government." This was the sort of thing John Grayson might have been reading if he had stayed in England. He would probably have dismissed the subject with the careless comment, "People are always fighting and killing each other in those out-of-the-way places," and turned with quickened interest to the great cricket match on the next page.