were not ashamed to show themselves on so solemn an occasion. I saw two women of a race strange to me, with coppery faces and a perpendicular mark painted in ochre on their foreheads. Strangest of all was a holy man who stood humbly by the wayside. Yet, after all, he was of one brotherhood with the mourners for Hüsseïn. He did not raise his eyes as the procession passed him, nor did he hold out his hand. What first attracted my attention to the goodness of his face were two small round reddish things between which I saw it. Then I made out the reddish things to be onions, spitted on either end of a steel skewer that pierced both his cheeks. XI GREEK FEASTS One of the most characteristic things about Constantinople is that while it has become Turkish it has not ceased to be Greek. The same is true of Thrace, Macedonia, and the fringe of Asia Minor, which contain large Turkish and other populations, but which still form a part of the Greek world to which they always belonged. The two races have indisputably influenced each other, as their languages and certain of their customs prove. A good deal of Greek blood now flows, too, in Turkish veins. Nevertheless there has been remarkably little assimilation, after five hundred years, of one element by the other. They coexist, each perfectly distinct and each claiming with perfect reason the land as his own. This is perhaps one cause why religious festivals are so common among the Greeks of Turkey. It is as a religious community that they have remained separate since the conquest. Through their religious observances they live what is left them of a national life and assert their claim to the great tradition of their race. The fact doubtless has something to do with the persistence of observances that elsewhere tend to disappear. At all events, those observances are extremely interesting. They have a local colour, for one thing, of a kind that has become rare in Europe and that scarcely ever existed in America. Then they are reckoned by the Julian calendar, now thirteen days behind our own, and that puts them into a certain perspective. Their true perspective, however, reaches much farther back. Nor is it merely that they compose a body of tradition from which we of the West have diverged or separated. Our religious customs and beliefs did not spring out of our own soil. We transplanted them in full flower from Rome, and she in turn had already borrowed largely from Greece and the East. But in the Levant such beliefs and customs represent a native growth, whose roots run far deeper than Christianity.