"One day," says one old village Assyrian greybeard, "Dr. Shedd was sitting at meat in his house when his servant, Meshadi, ran into the room crying, 'The Kurds have been among our people. They have taken three girls, three Christian girls, and are carrying them off. They have just passed the gate.' The Kurds were all bristling with daggers and pistols. Dr. Shedd simply picked up the cane that he holds in his hand when he walks. He hurried out of the house with Meshadi, ran up the hill to the Kurd village that lies there, entered, said to the fierce Kurds, 'Give back those girls to us.' And they, as they looked into his face, could not resist him though they were armed and he was not. So they gave the Assyrian girls back to him and he led them down the hill to their homes." So he also stood single-handed between Turks and five hundred Assyrians who had taken refuge in the missionary compound, and stopped the Turks from massacring the Christians. But even as he worked in this way the tide of the great war flowed towards Urumia. The people there were mostly Assyrians with some Armenians; they were Christians. They looked southward across the mountains to the British Army there in Mesopotamia for aid. But, as the Assyrians looked up from Urumia to the north they could already see the first Turks coming down upon the city. Thousands upon thousands of the Assyrians from the country villages crowded into the city and into the American missionary compound, till actually even in the mission school-rooms they were sleeping three deep--one lot on the floor, another lot on the seats of the desks and a third on the top of the desks themselves. "Hold on; resist; the help of the British will come," said Dr. Shedd to the people. "Agha Petros with a thousand of our men has gone to meet the British and he will come back with them and will throw back the Turks." The Turks and the Kurds came on from the north; many of the Armenian and Assyrian men were out across the plains to the east getting in the harvest; and no sign of succour came from the south. II Through the fierce hot days of July the people held on because Dr. Shedd said that they must; but at last on the afternoon of July 30th there came over all the people a strange irresistible panic. They gathered all their goods together and piled them in wagons--food, clothes, saucepans, jewelry, gold, silver, babies, old women, mothers,--all were huddled and jumbled together. The wagons creaked, the oxen lurched down the roads to the south, the little children cried with hunger and fright, the boys trudged along rather excited at the adventure yet rather scared at the awful hullabaloo and the strange feeling of horror of the cruel Kurdish horsemen and of the crafty Turk. Dr. Shedd made one last vain effort to persuade the people to hold on to their city; but it was impossible--they had gone, as it seemed, mad with fright.