Most of us can recall the peculiar sensation we experience on returning into the fresh air from the fetid atmosphere of an ill-ventilated apartment, the noxious nature of which we had scarcely realized as long as we remained there. So also the true character of Eastern conditions only seemed to come home to us after we had left the country. At least, speaking for my travelling companion and myself, we only seemed to realize the treeless desolation, the wilderness of roadless Kurdistan, as we were passing through that beautiful, richly verdured section of Austria and South Germany traversed by the Orient Express. Then it was that the contrast enabled us to appreciate as perhaps never before the benefits of the high state of European land culture. The same feeling might well suggest itself to the traveller in passing from Dover to London through Kent, the Garden of England. On arrival in London, however, other features of Eastern life forced themselves on our memory and suggested comparisons less flattering to our own social conditions. Needless to say they were those which account for the strange fascination the East exercises even upon some of the most cultured European travellers. Indeed, it was a strange, for the moment an almost unaccountable, sight to behold the crowds of people flocking into the City of a morning from the suburbs. This haste, this eagerness, as if their very life depended upon catching a train, constantly struck one as unnatural after living for weeks along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates, staying in villages in which the conditions were so primitive—a contrast almost beyond comprehension. What could be the driving motive that impelled these people to this feverish activity, this restlessness? Why, hunger, to be sure, the grim necessities of the battle of life, a struggle to be continued without intermission from youth to the grave, and, when done, leaving little to take note of except, perhaps, that a mutton chop more or less would be called for at their particular luncheon haunt. And the background: Tooting Bec, Clapham, and Brixton in the South, Pentonville and Hackney in the North, and the East End with its miles of slums and its paupers; or to take those parts more familiar to middle-class life, Marylebone and Bloomsbury, with their interminable, dull, featureless roads and terraces, the rows of houses in their dread monotony, veritable soul-killing mausoleums of the living: what Buskin termed “streets in hell.” To think of their commonplace residents with their fads and fancies and their sympathies rigorously narrowed down in accordance with the tenets of their faith. All are supposed to worship the selfsame God, and yet they are socially divided, cut off from each other as nowhere people are in the East. Surely life should have some wider and nobler scope, aim, and application than the mere gratification of the appetite to live, were it only to cultivate that restful spirit