The learned and amiable Peshtimaljian died in the year 1837. In the same year, Mrs. Dwight and one of her children became victims of the plague. Her husband escaped the contagion, though of course greatly exposed. This terrible disease had been almost an annual visitation at Constantinople, and was believed to be imported from Egypt. As soon as it made its appearance, schools must be closed, public worship suspended, and the giving and receiving of visits in great measure interrupted. The quarantine appears to have been an effectual preventive. In the course of this year, the missionaries had a meeting at Smyrna, at which Messrs. King, Temple, Goodell, Bird, Adger, and Houston were present. Its results were important and interesting. During the sessions, Mr. King preached two sermons to a Greek audience in the chapel of the Dutch Consulate. This was seven years after the commencement of his mission in Greece. Mr. Bird was there, on his way from Syria to his native land, and wrote, on hearing Mr. King preach and seeing the apparent effect, that he became quite reconciled to his laboring among the Greeks, rather than the Arabs. In the same year Boghos, vicar of the Patriarch, encouraged by certain bankers, resolved to break up the mission High School for Armenians in Pera, of which Hohannes was the principal. In preparation for this, a College had been built at Scutari, some months before, on an extended scale; and the public school in Has Keuy, superintended by Kevork, had been committed to the general supervision of one of the great bankers residing there, that it might be remodeled according to his own wishes, and made a first-rate school. This was deemed a needful preliminary to shutting up the mission High School. Early in the year, the parents were summoned before the vicar, and ordered to withdraw their sons from that school. The plan of the opposing party was, in this case, after breaking up the school, to procure from the Turkish government the banishment of Hohannes. But they had misapprehended the banker, and great was their astonishment when they heard that Hohannes was no sooner released, by their own act, from his connection with the mission school, than he was engaged by the banker of Has Keuy to take the superintendence of the national school they had placed in his hands. In vain they remonstrated. To their assertion, that it was the American system he had adopted he replied, that he knew nothing of the Americans, but had adopted the system because it was good. To their objection, that the principal was evangelical, he responded, "So am I." He at length declared, that unless they permitted him to manage the school in his own way, he would withdraw from the Armenian community. They could not afford to lose one of the leading bankers; and one of the principal opposers, finding it necessary, in a business transaction, to throw himself on his clemency, opposition ceased for a time, and a school of six hundred