The dancing waves of the Marmora, as they gently lap along its curving shore, are as soothing as a lullaby to a cradled child. And all the while they are murmuring the same old story that greeted the ears of the seafaring Megarians as they passed by nearly three thousand years ago and which reached the crews of the trim Venetian argosies whose arms proudly floated on their flags and pennants as they conveyed the treasures of India and China from the ports of the Euxine to the gem-blue haven of the peerless Queen of the Adriatic. The noonday sun, playing over the rippling waters, changes them in rapid succession from the delicate color of the lapis lazuli to the scintillating iridescence of the opal. Along the coast line one contemplates with ever-increasing delight countless views of entrancing beauty and interest--gray moss-covered rocks which are ever of tender loveliness and reposeful silence; trembling vines and waving figs and olives and oranges; picturesque adobe cottages adorned with graceful creepers; romping children who make the air ring with their joyous shouts; men and women in the most colorful garbs quietly performing their daily tasks and all the while completely immune from the feverish haste that so distracts the toiling millions of Europe and America and converts their life into a long and troubled nightmare. The secret is that the normal Osmanli peasant is satisfied with little. Permit him to cultivate his small plot of ground in peace and to remain undisturbed in the bosom of his family and he is perfectly happy. Under such conditions he would find nothing to envy even in the lot of the denizens of the Happy Valley. On our arrival at Ismid we were reminded that we were traveling over classic ground. For this small Turkish town was under the Roman Empire one of the largest cities in Asia Minor. It was here that Diocletian had his seat of Government; it was here that he began his sanguinary persecutions against the Christians and it was here that he abdicated the throne. It was in his imperial villa near here that death claimed Constantine the Great and it was in a neighboring castle that Hannibal committed suicide. And Nicomedia was the birthplace of Arrian, the illustrious disciple of Epictetus, who, from notes of his master’s lectures, prepared the famed _Discourses of Epictetus_. He also wrote the scarcely less celebrated _Anabasis of Alexander the Great_.