I am soon for bed. We must be up by six. At least I suppose it is six. The way they tell time here makes me dizzy. So many hours since sunrise, they say. Or, so many hours since sunset. The precise minute for doing any given thing must be worked out the way they make a time-table at the sea-shore, to show you when to take your swim. The mischief of it is, of course, that the time-table varies each day. The night we arrived in Tarsus, after our weeks of camping in the Taurus, we rode our tired horses under the arch of the college gate at ten P.M. The silly clock in a tower near by was striking four. I am not sure whether the East or the West knows the philosophical way to tell time. Perhaps Western reckoning tends to be too precise, and Greenwich time is contrary to nature. Anyhow, the Eastern way would make an efficiency expert's work-schedule look like a cinema film run by a greenhorn. Perhaps these Eastern peoples who dream dreams and feed their souls on starlight must map out their day by the going of the sun. THREE CHRISTMASES AND THE SEVEN SLEEPERS _Tarsus, December twenty-fifth._ DEAREST MOTHER: College classes going at full swing to-day. It is not Christmas for the boys. Some of the early missionaries to Turkey had it in their noddle that December twenty-fifth was really the day Christ was born, and they were shocked to see the Greeks celebrating January sixth and the Armenians January nineteenth. Missionaries were unimaginative, too, wrapped up in their own narrow ideas, too sure they were right and all the rest of mankind wrong (else why had they sacrificed everything to come way out here?) to realize that the Eastern calendar is thirteen days behind ours. The missionaries couldn't call the Greek aberration a sin. They could not logically hold out for a calendar made in Rome! But they did get after their Armenian converts on the theological question, and for many years insisted on an American celebration. Absurdities like that have now happily passed in missionary work, and your missionary of to-day is better able to distinguish between essentials and non-essentials than the old-fashioned Puritans, who were every bit as bigoted as medieval Catholics. But I am getting away from Christmas in Asia! Herbert and I taught our classes this morning as usual. We are going to celebrate to-night. We have a turkey roasting, and there is a jar of cranberry sauce that did not arrive in time for Thanksgiving. I have just come from the kitchen, flushed with the stove and the triumph of having really succeeded in doing the trick I learned at Simmons College last year. My fruits and nuts are genuinely _glacéd_.