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Show FOREIGN DEPARTMENT TURKEY From One Who Could Come Away The following story was sent us by a member of a small party which traveled up from a Turkish city near the Mediterranean coast to Constantinople, and has since reached America. The writer says: - "On a Monday morning, at four o'clock, we started, and after traveling all day and night reached about nine o'clock the next morning. We had three hours to wait here, so taking a carriage at the station we rode to the home of an Armenian there, a well-educated, fine young doctor whom we had met on a previous visit. We found his wife and two small children at home, but the doctor had been taken a year ago to work for the wounded Turkish soldiers. "The wife had heard of the exiling of all the Armenians from different towns around her, so was packing a few things to take with her when her hour came to go. That hour arrived while we were in her home. All the Armenians were ordered to be at the station in twenty-four hours, to be sent-where? They did not know, but they did know that they had to leave everything-the little homes they had worked for for years, the few little things they had collected, all must be left to the plunder of the Turks. Life's Saddest Hours "It was one of the saddest hours I ever lived through; in fact, the hours following on the train to Constantinople were the saddest hours I ever spent. I wish I might picture the scene in that Armenian home, and we knew that in hundreds of other homes in that very town the same heartbreaking scenes might be witnessed. "The courage of that brave little doctor's wife, who knew she must take her two babies and face starvation and death with them! Many began to come to her home-to her, for comfort and cheer, and she gave it. I have never seen such courage before. You have to go to the darkest places of the earth to see the brightest lights, to the most obscure spot to find the greatest heroes. "Her bright smile, with no trace of fear in it, was like a beacon light in that mud village where hundreds were doomed. "It wasn't because she didn't understand how they felt; she was one of them. It wasn't because she had no dear ones in peril; her husband was far away ministering to those who were sending her and her babies to destruction. " 'Oh! there is no God for the Armenians,' said one Armenian who, with others, had come in to talk it over. "Just then a poor woman rushed in to get some medicine for a young girl who had fainted when the order came. Such despair, such hopelessness, you have never seen on human faces in America. " ' It is the slow massacre of our entire race,' said one woman. 'It is worse than massacre,' replied a man. The Crier's Warning "The town crier went through all the streets of the village crying out that any one who helped the Armenians in any way, gave them food, money, or anything, would be beaten and cast into prison. It was more than we could stand. " 'Have you any money?' we asked the doctor's wife. 'Yes,' she said, 'a few liras, but many families will have nothing.' "After figuring out what it would 27 |