Some one at Mr. Whitely’s dinner, this winter, asked what was a sufficient income, and you, Maizie, gravely answered, “A little more than one has,” which made us all laugh. If you had not been the quicker and the wittier, and thus forestalled me, I should have said, “Enough to satisfy the few or many wishes each person creates within himself which money can satisfy.” Thanks to my prize, my writings, and the profits of my text-books, I obtained this. In fact, the three so lengthened my purse that I fancy few millionaires have ever felt so truly rich; for I was enabled to gratify my greatest wish. In our visits to Spain, Italy, and Constantinople, I had garnered all that I could find bearing on the two great race movements of the Moors and Turks, which so changed the world’s history; but I had discovered that I needed more than the documentary materials to write clearly of them. I longed to go to their source, and then follow the channels along which those racial floods had rushed, till, encountering the steel armor and gunpowder of Europe, they had dashed in scattered spray, never to gather force again. In my eagerness I had been for making the attempt before, but my father had urged our limited means and the shortness of my university vacations as bars to my wishes. My degree removed the one objection, and my earnings and prize the other. Few persons would care to undertake the travel we planned with the pittance we had earned, but it was enough for us. How fortunate it is for me that my student life and travels trained me to absolute self-denial and frugality! Otherwise these last three years of closest economy and niggardliness would have been hard to bear. By the influence of Professor Humzel, working first through his former pupil, Baron Weiseman, secondly through Giers, and thirdly through I know not whom, we secured permission to join a Russian surveying party, and thus safely and expeditiously reached the mountains of the Altai range. We did not stay with the party after they began their work, but assuming native dress we turned southward; plunging instantly among the medley of peoples and tongues which actually realizes the mythical Babel. Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit I had mastered in varying degrees, and they were an “open sesame” to the dialects we encountered, while the hot sun and open-air life soon colored us so deeply that we passed for men of a distant but not alien race. Following nature’s routes, once man’s only paths, we wandered leisurely: to Tashkend on horseback, to Bokhara on foot, by boat down the Amoo to Khiva, and on to Teheran, then by caravan to Bagdad, up the Euphrates, gradually working through Asia Minor. Stopping at Smyrna for a brief rest, we took boat to Cyprus, from thence crossed to Damascus, and from Jerusalem traveled along the caravan route to Mecca. Passing over the Red Sea to Egypt, we skirted the south coast of the Mediterranean, till we reached the Pillars of Hercules.