[Sidenote: KIRKUK FOLK] I can quote an example which shows how this hospitable quality often appeared. Some days after I arrived there I found the soles of my boots flapping under me as I walked, so repaired to a shop in the bazaar where Bagdad shoes were for sale. Selecting a pair, I proceeded to bargain, but not knowing the proper price, I was somewhat at a loss to determine my highest figure. The shopkeeper asked two mejidies or forty piastres, so I proposed eighteen piastres, and brought him down by degrees to twenty-two, when having nearly halved the original price, I thought it sufficient, and assented. I produced a mejidie in payment, and was groping in my pocket for the two piastres remaining, when the shopkeeper extended his hand, saying: “A mejidie is the real price; you are a stranger, and did not our prophet command us all to honour the stranger? Take the shoes, for from you I will not take more than a mejidie, for a Kirkukli the price is twenty-five piastres, but big profits among ourselves do not matter, whereas from you--who I hope will go from Kirkuk with pleasant remembrances--I am content with what a mejidie gives.” This sentiment I encountered everywhere in Kirkuk, except from the Christians; but that is but natural, seeing that I was in the guise of a Muhammadan. I experienced later the kindness of the Chaldeans for strange Christians in the town. Besides the Turkomans and other Muhammadans there is a large number of Chaldeans and of Syrian Christians, natives of Bagdad. A few Armenians are also there, employed in Government and commercial affairs, but they are natives of Diarbekr or Armenia. The Chaldean settlement is of considerable antiquity, having migrated here, according to their own traditions, during the time of Alp Arslan, in the 11th century. If Kirkuk is, as the natives assert, a remnant of the Seljuq kings, this is possible, and perhaps even probable. Unlike the Chaldeans of Mosul, they have not forgotten the Syriac character, and while they speak only Turkish, employ these characters in writing among themselves. It is only the Chaldeans who are found living among the Kurds, who have retained their language, both written and spoken. In Mosul, where it is reckoned part of a good education to know it, it has no generality of use, and one has to go to the villages to hear it spoken. There is a church in Kirkuk administered by priests from Mosul; the Chaldeans are, like nearly all in Turkish territory, Roman Catholics, for the old Chaldean Church died under the unscrupulous assaults of the Roman Catholics, who pursued a Machiavellian policy in bringing over the old Church to Papal allegiance, a change which has been for nothing but the worse.[31]