One day Enver asked me to ride with him in the Belgrade forest. As I was losing no opportunities to influence him, I accepted this invitation. We motored to Buyukdere, where four attendants with horses met us. In our ride through the beautiful forest Enver became rather more communicative in his conversation than ever before. He spoke affectionately of his father and mother. When they were married, he said, his father had been sixteen and his mother only eleven, and he himself had been born when his mother was fifteen. In talking of his wife, the Imperial Princess, he disclosed a much softer side to his nature than I had hitherto seen. He spoke of the dignity with which she graced his home, regretted that Mohammedan ideas of propriety prohibited her from entering social life, but expressed a wish that she and Mrs. Morgenthau could meet. He was then furnishing a beautiful new palace on the Bosphorus; when this was finished, he said, the Princess would invite my wife to breakfast. Just then we were passing the house and grounds of Senator Abraham Pasha, a very rich Armenian. This man had been an intimate friend of the Sultan Abdul Aziz, and, since in Turkey a man inherits his father’s friends as well as his property, the Crown Prince of Turkey, a son of Abdul Aziz, made weekly visits to this distinguished Senator. As we passed through the park, Enver noticed with disgust that woodmen were cutting down trees, and stopped them. When I heard afterward that the Minister of War had bought this park I understood one of the reasons for his anger. Since Abraham Pasha was an Armenian, this gave me an opportunity to open the subject again. I spoke to him of the terrible treatment from which the Armenian women were suffering. “You said that you wanted to protect women and children,” I remarked, “but I know that your orders are not being carried out.” “Those stories can’t be true,” he said, “I cannot conceive that a Turkish soldier would ill-treat a woman with child.” Perhaps, if Enver could have read the circumstantial reports which were then lying in the archives of the American Embassy, he might have changed his mind. Shifting the conversation once more, he asked me about my saddle, which was the well-known “General McClellan” type. Enver tried it, and liked it so much that he afterwards borrowed it, had one made for his own use--even including the number in one corner--and he adopted it for one of his regiments. He told me of the railroads which he was then building in Palestine, said how well the Cabinet was working, and pointed out that there were great opportunities in Turkey now for real estate speculation. He even suggested that he and I join hands in buying land that was sure to rise in value! But I insisted in talking about the Armenians. However, I made no more progress than before. “We shall not permit them to cluster in places where they can plot mischief and help our enemies. So we are going to give them new quarters.”