An hour later we were alongside the wharf and friends from the shore who had been advised that we had entered the Bosphorus came aboard to welcome us safely back. On the wharf was drawn up a company of savage-looking Turkish soldiers. They proved to be the Sultan’s welcome to his prodigals, returning from the storm-tossed Caucasus. I have never just fathomed the status of a refugee in Turkey, but I gathered then that it must be against the law to escape slaughter in a foreign land and come home to your own. Anyway my refugees were promptly marched off to jail, and they, their past and future faded forever from my interest. I found wires urging me make haste for Russia and so turning the _France_ over to her owners I hurried to the Pera-Palace Hotel and got into some clean clothes and while Morris was throwing my baggage together for the Berlin train, I was making my formal calls. First on Mr. Jay at the American Legation, who welcomed me cordially and showed me the wire all drawn and addressed to the State Department at Washington, advising them that the _France_ had been wrecked. For two days it had lain on his desk and only been held up on receipt of my wire from Trebizond that I was on my way back to the Golden Horn. Now for the first time I learned in full of the widespread havoc of wreck and misery that storm had caused these past ten days. Dozens of ships had suffered disaster and the hope of the _France’s_ safety, it appeared, had been well-nigh abandoned. But it was all passed now and Jay and I laughed at it that night as we sat in our evening clothes over our wine and cigars at the Club. A few words with the British Ambassador and the turning over of my mails and dispatches and my duties in Constantinople were over. The carefully prepared cable from the Caucasus I had brought with me, and not daring to trust it to the Turkish wire, I had given it into the hands of a courier who had caught a train within the hour for the frontier where he had filed it in an uncensored telegraph office. I waited in the hotel for the few hours to elapse before a wire came to me from our London office confirming its safe arrival and then with my impedimenta I was on the train once more, hurrying for the Russian capital. My story is almost done. The situation was quietly adjusting itself. Five nights I spent on the train and on the morning of the sixth day I was on the Nevsky Prospekt once more. Two weeks sufficed to reorganize our news service in Russia and to turn the situation over to our correspondent whose duty it was to look after affairs in that territory. I had been doing war assignments pretty steadily now for more than two years and both my mind and body craved repose. My reprieve from further work came one night as I was chatting over Russian politics in one of Petersburg’s fashionable restaurants. I read my cable and sighed with satisfaction.