Before reaching the city we must ford the Shaher, a river that, though frequently all drained off into the fields in summer, is very deep in early spring, when fatal accidents sometimes occur. It was here that, in May, 1846, Miss Fiske narrowly escaped a watery grave. On her way to Seir, with Mr. and Mrs. Stoddard, the horse lay down in the middle of the river, leaving her to be swept off by the rapid current. Mr. Stoddard hastened to the rescue; but the moment his steed was loose, he rushed to attack the horse of Mrs. Stoddard, and, as Miss Fiske rose to the surface, she caught a glimpse of Mr. Stoddard looking back on the battle, and his wife held between the combatants by her riding habit, which had caught on the saddle; but while she looked the dress gave way, and Mrs. Stoddard was safe. She herself had sufficient presence of mind not to breathe under water, and, on coming up for the fifth time, floated into shallow water near the opposite shore, forty rods below the ford, just as Mr. Stoddard reached the same point. From the river, beautiful orchards line the road on both sides to the city gate, of which a representation is given on page 154; and about one eighth of a mile inside of that, where the Nestorian and Moslem sections of the city join each other, stand the mission premises, built of sun-dried bricks, like the houses around them. They occupy a little more than an acre, in the form of a parallelogram; and if, for the sake of clearness, we compare it to a window, the bottom of the lower sash is represented by a long, earthen-roofed structure, half of it a dwelling house, once the home of Dr. Grant, but now the dwelling of Dr. Wright. It is the building on the left of the engraving at page 131, and the round object occupying the nearest window in the second story is a clock, the gift of a well-known merchant of Boston, brother of one of our deceased missionaries. Let our lower sash be filled by two large panes in modern style, and these are represented by two courts surrounded by pavements, and shaded by large sycamore trees. In the engraving just referred to, the spectator stands in one of these courts, looking over a low wall into the other. For the top of the lower sash, we have another building, extending across the premises. The left half of this appearing on page 131, behind the trees, and on the opposite page represented without them, was the first home of Dr. Perkins, and is now the Female Seminary; but repeated additions and modifications have been required to transform a building, originally erected for a private residence, into a structure suitable for such a school. Miss Fiske first taught in one room of a building to the right, which does not appear in the engraving, though a part of it is seen on page 131; then, as the school grew larger, another room was added, and when those quarters became too strait, this building was remodelled for its use. [Illustration: Female seminary at Oboomiah]