The ladies liked the place; but when they first came here they had to put up with a great deal of annoyance, owing to the Turkish little boys. The latter, unaccustomed to see women walking about in European costume, and with their faces uncovered, had sometimes followed them in the street and thrown mud at their dresses. Whenever this occurred, and any elder Turks were present, they had chastised their young compatriots and put an immediate end to the disturbance. "I dare say," observed one of the missionaries, "that it was a strange sight for the people in Sivas to see our ladies walking about the town. However, if a Turkish woman were put down in the streets of New York, I reckon that she would have a crowd at her heels before long." This remark reminded me of an episode which had recently occurred in America, and which had found its way into the newspapers. It appeared that a Chinese lad was selling sweets and lollipops in New Orleans, when a burly native, coming up to him, kicked over the tray and the boy's wares. The lad, without a word of remonstrance, picked up his lollipops. The man a second time upset them into the mud. The child looked at his tormentor, and, collecting his sweetmeats, said to him, "You are a Christian and I am a heathen; I should be sorry to change places with you!" "There are bad people all over the world," remarked one of the missionaries; "the poor ignorant Turks are not nearly so cruel as some people would have us believe." "No, they are not cruel," observed another gentleman, "but they are pig-headed—that is their great fault. They will not advance with the times in which they live; if they adopt European inventions, they copy them blindly, and without adapting them to circumstances. Soon after the telegraph was invented, the Turks determined to have special lines, and to use the Turkish alphabet; the man who was employed to arrange the system copied it blindly from our own. Now 'E' and 'I,' the fifth and ninth letters in our alphabet, are those which occur very frequently in an ordinary message; in Europe the telegraph dial is so arranged as to facilitate the transmission of the letters most often employed. The Turk, when he came to 'I,' and found it was the ninth letter in our alphabet, placed the ninth in his own on the same footing, whereas that letter is, comparatively speaking, but seldom used." "A few years ago," observed one of the missionaries, "there was an Englishman here connected with the Anglo-Indian Telegraph. We were then as well supplied with information as the people in London or New York. It was the time of the French war, and all the news was sent daily from England to Hindostan. Our friend used to tap the wire, and send us a little budget of information every morning; but now he has gone, and all that we hear is several weeks or months old."