By noon we were fairly well stocked and ready to put to sea. Then there came to my mind the cable that I had sent not only to my paper but also to the American Embassy at Constantinople. “I propose to bring off American refugees,” they had read. I had talked the matter over with Stuart and it appeared that the only Americans there were Armenians (nationalized in name only) and they for the most part declined to be deported, not even to help me to live up to my cables. I called Morris and explained the situation to him. American refugees was what the contract called for, but lacking the letter of my cable we would have to fill in with any kind of refugees that the market offered. I told him to go ashore and make the necessary arrangements and to pass the word around that we were sailing that very afternoon at four o’clock. In the meantime I ordered up the “Blue Peter” to the foremast head that all ashore might know that we proposed to depart that day for the world that lay without. I went ashore and had lunch with Stuart, who introduced me to a number of the consuls of the Powers that were represented in Batuum, all of whom were eager to get word out to their governments. By three that afternoon I had packages of official dispatches, inscribed in impressive terms and sealed authoritatively, consigned to the governments of Austria, Holland, America and Great Britain, while a fair-sized sack was required to hold the mail that poured in upon us. Stuart could not leave his office and I bade him farewell at his desk, accepting his cheery promise to “look me up” in America at an early planned visit to my country. Little did either of us think that ere a month would pass an assassin’s bullet would cut him down in the very prime of his life. Yet so it was. I read a few weeks later in the European press my good, kind, cheery friend was shot from ambush by some unknown man, even as he was entering the door of his house. An excellent man was Stuart and a public servant true to his trust in time of trouble; so true, in fact, that in the execution of his official duties he had encountered the opposition of some discontent in that seething vortex, who had availed himself of the cure of all evils in that wild country—assassination. A bare line or two announced his death and he was forgotten. Yet this man was in his way as much of a martyr to his duty as any soldier who falls gloriously in battle.