We started on our journey down the Tigris under a cloudless sky. During the early morning it had been quite chilly, but, as the sun rose in the heavens, the atmosphere became as balmy as that of a morning in May. All augured a pleasant voyage; and no sooner had the minarets of Mosul and Nebi Yunus vanished from our sight than we proceeded to give the interior of our tent as homelike an appearance as circumstances would permit. Simoun had decked the opening of the tent with some flowers that our kind friends had brought us. On our writing table we placed some of our favorite books. Among these was a small copy in India paper of the Bible which was in constant use during our journey in the Orient. Another was a small pocket edition of the _Divina Commedia_ which, for years, had been my companion to the most distant parts of the world. There were also small editions of the _Soliloquia_ of St. Augustine and of the select works of St. Teresa. I took these last two books with me because they, like Dante’s immortal poem, had been old and cherished friends in other lands and because they seemed peculiarly appropriate for such a journey as the one we were then undertaking. To these were added copies of Xenophon’s _Anabasis_, Arrian’s _Anabasis of Alexander_, and _The Oxford Book of English Verse_. The other books I had brought with me I left in my trunk, as I expected to spend most of my time on our way down the river in contemplation of the many objects of interest with which both banks were everywhere studded. A great part of the land in the vicinity of Mosul is under cultivation. Wheat and barley are grown in abundance. Hemp is also cultivated but more attention is given to cotton, especially along the banks and on the islands which diversify the river. Melons seem to be as popular along the Tigris as they are among our dusky population south of Mason and Dixon’s line. Much of the land in this region is very fertile and, if irrigated as it was three thousand years ago, would yield harvests as extraordinary as ever in the past. But the countless vicissitudes, consequent on wars innumerable and on inefficient government, through which this ill-fated region has passed since the fall of Nineveh, have not been conducive to the development of agriculture nor to the economic growth of what was once the wealthiest country of Western Asia. I have been on many rivers but I have never found so much genuine intellectual pleasure on any of them as on the Tigris. It has not, indeed, the natural beauties of the Hudson or the Columbia, of the Rhine or the Danube; but it has something that appealed to me far more than the attractions for which these famous waterways of America and Europe are so justly celebrated. Charged with the myths and the legends, the traditions and the historical associations of six millennia, it offers to the thoughtful student subjects for consideration that cannot be found elsewhere.