The audience of students and teachers was increased by the parents of boys living in Tarsus and local Moslem dignitaries, the Kaïmakam, the Feriq and the Mufti.[3] They were delighted to come, and praised our school and its hospitality. At the end of each scene they applauded conspicuously. The Mufti's parchment-like cheeks wrinkled to expose his yellow gumless teeth in an appreciative grin, while the Kaïmakam shook hands with the asthmatic Feriq Pasha until his Hamidian decorations jingled on his breast. Our efforts to persuade the boys to cut out a part here and there were in vain. They insisted on giving the whole blessed thing. Candied almonds and glasses of water passed around in the audience helped to keep them awake. The atmosphere was hot and close, and the petroleum was getting low in the lamps. Between the first and second acts the school band--all individualists--did their favorite piece, the very march that the old German orchestra leader in Philadelphia used to play at the Country Club dances just after the last waltz before supper. The boys put the vigor of their youth and the enthusiasm of the occasion into their playing. I was glad the venerable Mufti had cotton in his ears. The place was already so full of people and talk and lamp-baked air that I thought the floor of the dormitory above would spill down on us when the band thundered a climax of horns, trombones, drums and cymbals. As the play went on, the audience did not need candied almonds or music to keep them awake. Things began to go badly for Hamlet's mother's husband. People stopped fanning. The dignitaries moved uneasily in their places. With heads hunched down in their shoulders, they kept their eyes glued on the stage. They are not familiar with our great William, and believe, no doubt, that we invented the play as well as the actors' costumes. Horror of horrors! We had forgotten what they might read into the most realistic scene. An Armenian warning for Abdul Hamid? The assassins mastered the struggling king. He lay there with his red hair sticking out from his crown, and the muscles of his neck stiffened as he gasped for breath while his throat was cut with a shiny white letter-opener. As I fell asleep last night, I saw the three dignitaries leaning forward frowning. The Mufti had clinched the sides of the bench with his thin hands. Could they be seriously disapproving of our show, because we killed a king in it? I went to sleep laughing over Doctor Christie's story of the way the authorities would not permit him to teach physics in the early days because he was obliged to use the word "revolution." _April ninth._