Thus came John Narcissus Dean to be swinging his sturdy legs on a box aboard an Austrian-Lloyd steamer bound for Samsoon. He was a fine boy, well matured for his seven years, and already he had a manner of command which made a slave of his devoted nurse Anna, a big fresh-coloured country girl, one of the small group that had gathered, seven years before, at the foot of the staircase at "Fourways." Anna had never intended going to Asia Minor, which she looked upon with the same horror as she did the South Sea Islands. Her first excursion, to Amsterdam, had been taken with great daring. Only love of the child she nursed and the mistress she served, could have prevailed upon her to leave England, for as all the peasant class, she had a loathing of foreigners. But from Amsterdam to Berlin had not seemed so far, and then the change to Bordeaux was like coming half-way home, so she remained with the family, and, as the years went by, became more tightly bound by affection to her young charge. For, however much she admired her mistress, she never doubted for one moment that, without her, young John Narcissus could not live. She had nursed him from a baby, was familiar with all his complaints, and also his moods, which were peculiar and trying. It was Anna alone who could curb those terrible fits of passion which so alarmed the fond parents. The child had a way of working himself into a fanatical frenzy when pleased by anything. At first these moods had been attributed to infant naughtiness and had been punished, but without result. An eminent Berlin specialist, whom they had consulted in distress, had said that the child's brain was abnormally developed. He was to be humoured and closely watched. With time and careful guarding he would outgrow those storms of passion and ecstasy. So Anna immediately took the specialist's words to heart. Without her the child would not live. When the change to Constantinople was announced, her first intention was to give notice. She did not object to France or Holland, but Turkey was a barbarian country where Christians were crowded together and shot at with bows and arrows, or cut to a thousand pieces with terrible knives like those which grocers used for carving hams. But she could not think of leaving the child; and, after all, she had been to Berlin, which was almost half-way across Europe. She decided to go to Constantinople, for the more she considered the matter the firmer grew her conviction that her master and mistress were mad.