For me the food from the German mess was chiefly welcome in that it brought me a good friend--the dragoman who came with it. He was a Jew, originally from Salonika, with a long, tongue-twisting name impossible to remember, so that I called him Jean Willi, French being our conversational medium. He was well-to-do, had been an official of the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople, and spoke seven languages. For the first two years of war he kept out of the army by means of _baksheesh_. Finally he was taken for service because he offended an influential officer; but his knowledge of languages, together with bribes placed in the right quarters, procured for him the safe appointment of a dragoman to the German Headquarters at Nazareth. Three times a day--with breakfast, lunch, and dinner--Jean Willi visited me. He tried to come oftener, but the Turks would not admit him. Everything I wanted he would move heaven and earth to get. He "obtained" a German soldier's cap for me, on discovering that I had no hat. He persuaded the German barber to bring the lunch one day, so that he might cut my hair. A comb, a tooth-brush, soap, books, and a dozen other things were brought by Jean Willi; and, having learned that my ready cash amounted to three and a half dollars, he pretended that the articles were sent by the German officers. Afterward I discovered this to have been a benevolent untruth. The wayside fallings of a roving life have brought me several Very Good Samaritans, but none other who did as much for me, under great difficulties, as Jean Willi. Before meeting him I was altogether broken in spirit; and with hopelessness filling my mind I had actually begun to fear for my reason. He understood all this and, to the limit of his powers, did his best to remedy it, well knowing that such action would bring him the enmity and suspicions of Turkish officers. His friendly conversation and his invariable kindness were splendid tonics, taken three times a day, at each visit. When he was away my mind was prevented from slipping back into the stagnation of despair by the books he smuggled into my room. The first of these was a German war novel--"_Der Eiserne Mann_"--procured from a Boche soldier. It purported to show how loyal were the Alsatians to the German Fatherland. It was untrue, stupidly sentimental, and often farcical; but, after all, so were most of the war novels published in England at that time. Then, in some dark recess of the house where he was billeted, he found a copy of "_Les liaisons dangereuses_"--an altogether extraordinary book to be salvaged from a little house in Nazareth. This was my first introduction to Barbéry d'Auréville; and joy and interest in his magnificent characterization completed the rescue of my mind from the slough of despondency.