The ball was a great success, and the whole entertainment went off admirably. Many Christian inhabitants brought their families to this ball; elderly Armenians and Greek matrons, gorgeously dressed, sat against the wall, and watched our dancing. Supper was served for two hundred persons, and continued till very late. We returned home at dawn, escorted by a military band. We had two Turks at dinner to-day, Ismael-Bey and Maksoud-Effendi. I could hardly keep from laughing in looking at the desperate efforts that they made in serving themselves with their knives and forks; how gladly they would have thrown away these instruments of torture to be able to tear their meat with their fingers! May 30th.—This afternoon we made an excursion to the banks of the Euphrates. After having made about five miles on horseback, we arrived at a sort of paved dike, which seemed to have been built by giants; the stones are so enormous that it is quite incomprehensible how human beings could handle them. For many centuries whole generations have gone over this ancient dike without its being necessary to mend it. The Euphrates is very broad in this part, and in full rise just now. Frogs were croaking around us, and whole flocks of wild geese dived about ten steps from us; their tranquillity, as it seems, is rarely troubled by musket-shots. On the middle of the river a boatman was rowing his yawl, cut out of the trunk of an enormous tree, with a long perch. On our way home we stopped at “Kian,” a small village where we created a great sensation, and were stared at as if we were beings from another world. The women crowded around; one of them determined to examine me closely grasped my arm exclaiming, “I have touched her, she is alive!” (Did she suppose that I was a wax-doll?) May 11th.—This morning a Turkish woman, holding a small boy dressed in the uniform of a pasha by the hand, has come with a petition to my husband. She began to relate different exploits of her ancestors, and concluded her long narrative by requesting Sergy to procure her means to return to Constantinople, her native town. Sergy tried to explain to her that the services rendered by her forefathers had nothing to do with the Russian government, but she continued to beg, and having received the sum that she requested, she whispered something to her little son, who came up to our interpreter and announced to him that he too, wanted a _bakshish_.