In a few weeks our first real vacation was suddenly brought to an end by the beginning of the great European War, and the Chellabi had to leave hastily for Paris, alone, on Mobilization Day. All the babies in the little Breton village, including my own three, were down with whooping-cough. The following seven weeks down there were a circus. I did everything, from mending the skull of a peasant woman who fell down stairs in a fit of drunken grief to acting as unofficial _maire_ of the commune and making out _permis de séjour_ and passports for the Maire's _adjoint_ to stamp. The journey back to Paris in the same month as the Battle of the Marne was comparatively easy, as most of the traffic was in the opposite direction. The two years since then, in this heroine city of Paris in wartime have been an unforgettable experience, in which both fatigue and leisure have alike been impossible. The "Ickle One" came into the world last November, to find her mother deep in baby relief work. Her real name is "Hope," because of my belief that the great hope of France and of the world is in the new generation. Now it is eight years that we have been inhabiting storm centers, and I have come to believe that my function is to create a normal home atmosphere in abnormal conditions. The book I have dreamed of has never been written. The appeal on my sympathies made by the sufferings of the Armenians of to-day, however, required that something should be done. For this reason I have resurrected the old and yellowed letters which I wrote to my mother during that agonizing time in Tarsus. Portions of them have been rewritten, and certain intimate details in which the public can have no interest have been cut out, and I have occasionally added a few explanatory details to make things clearer to the general reader. I now send them out in the hope that the plain story of one American woman's experiences will bring home to other American women and to American men the reality and the awfulness of these massacres and the heroism of the American missionaries, who, in many cases, have lain down their lives in defense of their Armenian friends and fellow Christians. Technically speaking, we were not missionaries. We went to Tarsus at the invitation of Dr. Thomas Davidson Christie, the President of the College there, to spend a year rendering what service we could to the regularly appointed missionaries; therefore I am at liberty to express, as I did above, my admiration for the American missionaries from a purely impartial standpoint. FOOTNOTE: [1] "Chellabi"--Turkish for "master of the house." CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I HALF WAY THROUGH THE FIRST YEAR 3 II THREE CHRISTMASES AND THE SEVEN SLEEPERS 13 III A VISIT TO ADANA 32 IV GREAT EXPECTATIONS 48 V ROUND ABOUT TARSUS 60