They were of course of great help to us when we were settling down in our house in Stamboul. Ours was a large stone house with nine good-sized rooms, one on the ground floor and four on each other floor. It had a large brick-covered entrance hall with two separate stairways which in the old days were used, one as the Harem stairway and the other as the Selamlik stairway, but of course we modernized this by using one of them for service. The walls and ceilings had been all replastered and with the exception of the entrance hall which was painted in Turkish blue, were all calsomined in gray. Of course we had electric light throughout and a telephone. The real innovation for Constantinople, however, was that we changed the kitchen from the basement, where it generally is located, to the first floor, near the dining-room where we had a regular American kitchenette built. Then we had a shower put in the spacious bathroom. So really the house is as comfortable as possible. As for the furniture, we had mostly some of the antique furniture collected by my father and myself in Western Europe, with here and there some Turkish embroideries, old pieces that have been in the family for many generations, and of course Turkish and Persian carpets. Despite our western furniture and some pictures we have on the walls we endeavoured to keep throughout the Oriental atmosphere of the house--not the kind of Turkish interior one sees in exhibitions, adorned with a lot of bric-a-brac and hangings, but the simple Oriental interior. This has been rather an easy task as our house is typically Turkish with large rooms of perfect proportions and big latticed windows. Therefore, by just placing a very few pieces of furniture in each room, by having straight hangings of pale Oriental colours in the windows, and by placing the few really valuable Turkish antiques in the most prominent place in each room, we have tried to keep the Turkish atmosphere which has so much charm and without which it would be sacrilegious to live in Stamboul, especially in a house like the one we have. Our friends and our guests have told us that we have succeeded in our endeavours and I believe this to be true, as an American lady with whom we have grown to be very good friends since; confided us that the first day she called on us bringing with her a letter of introduction from a mutual friend she was struck by the severe Turkish atmosphere of our house and--it being her first day in Constantinople and her imagination being full of all the horrid things she had heard about the Turks in America--she was rather nervous until she met my wife who breezed in to greet her in a perfectly American way. Needless to say that a short while after she was laughing with us at the reputation of being “terrible” which the Turks have abroad.