These were they who lent, perhaps, the most local colour to that Minor Asiatic youth. They were daughters of Armenia, for the most part. And I sometimes think that if William Watson had enjoyed my opportunities he never would have written “The Purple East.” Surely he never squirmed under an Armenian kiss, which in my day partook both of sniffing and of biting and which left the victim’s cheek offensively red and moist. Yet how can I remember with anything but gratitude the kindly neighbours to whom foreign children, coming and going between the houses that in those distant days made a small Anglo-American colony in upper Scutari, were always a source of interest? For some mysterious reason that is buried in the heart of exiled Anglo-Saxondom, we really knew wonderfully little about our neighbours. We never played with their children or entered other than strangers the world outside our garden wall. Nor was it because our neighbours were unwilling to meet us half-way. They paid us the compliment of naming a certain place of amusement which existed in our vicinity the American Theatre, hoping thereby to gain our patronage. But I fear this hope met with no response. At any rate, I never came nearer the unknown delights of the American Theatre than the top of our garden wall, from which I remember once listening entranced to such strains of music as never issued from our serious piano. I recognised them years afterward, with a jump, in an opera of Suppé. I have also lived to learn that Scutari, or the part of it where we lived, is a sort of Armenian Parnassus, perhaps even an Armenian Montmartre, given over entirely to the muses. Emancipated Armenian ladies, they tell me, do such unheard-of things as to walk, on their own two feet, vast distances over the hills of Asia with emancipated Armenian gentlemen in long locks and flowing neckties; and imperishable Armenian odes have celebrated the beauties of Baghlar Bashi and Selamsîz.