men, where even the Padishah is a woman, where the Government thinks much more of its women than of its men. If so much as a hair of their heads were touched, the Government of Inghiterra would wreak such vengeance on the land, that not a man would be left to tell the tale.

Sheikh (acting spokesman for the rest and eyeing us a little suspiciously): "But if they are women, where are their lords?"

Zaptich. "They have none. In Inghiterra the greatest princesses have no lords."

S. "Are they two sisters, then?"

Z. "No, friends. They went to the same school. In Inghiterra all the women go to school."

S. "Who are their fathers?"
Z. "Great Pashas."

S. "Why do they come here?" Z. "The Hekim (doctor) of Inghiterra has ordered it. He said to the biggest one there that one that never sits up -'for six months you must live in the air, you must never sleep in a house; the colder, the hungrier you are, the better; then you will come back well.' Therefore will she go out into the storm to sleep to-night in her tent."

S. "Is the Hekim great in Inghiterra?"

Z. "Greater than the Pashas, no one dares withstand him."

The soldier has given enough information for the present, and he refuses to answer any more questions. It is time for prayers. In the gloom of the hovel the soldiers stand, two or three in a line against the mud wall, the red glow of the embers falling on the straight figures. Now erect, now kneeling, now prostrate, they carry out the formal repetitions. There is no solemn hush. Smoking, coffee, and

conversation go on as usual.

It is Ramazan, and the men have tasted no food since sunrise. Ramazan

falls this year in winter. In summer, the sixteen or eighteen hours' fast tells on the serenest of tempers and constitutions. Now the sun will set about half-past six, and already, a quarter before the hour, the great bowl of pilaf, smoking hot, is placed on the hot ashes, the high heap of thin Arabic bread beside it. It is raining so hard, it will be impossible to see the exact minute the sun goes down; but fortunately it is not necessary to-night, for the guests of the evening have watches. Every eye for the last ten minutes has been fastened on the watch in my hand. I have eaten twice since they last broke the fast, but sympathy makes me every bit as desperate as they, and the excitement of the last few minutes is intense. "Besh dakika-deurt-uch—iki” (5 minutes-4-3-2). At one minute before the hour, the twenty backs bend forward, and every hand is ready for the onslaught; the suspense becomes unbearable. "Bitdi" ("it is over"), I exclaim, as the hand touches the hour; and for the next ten minutes only the smacking of lips breaks the silence of the evening.

In such-like fashion the evening passes; conversation flows, especially after supper; the innocent cup of coffee is passed round; the fire is carefully nursed; one or two men roll tobacco into excellent cigarettes, and distribute them among the company; some, wearied with the day's work, fall asleep; a soldier asks for a needle and stout thread, and mends his tattered clothes; one or two of the villagers come in and sit plaiting the coarse twine to make their sandals. Sometimes they will sing, or tell stories which have to be translated by the soldiers from Kurdish into Turkish for our edification. Among the Kurds, music is not developed as among the Arabs. They carry dancing, however, to a far more elaborate pitch, and, on the TIgris, we only felt ourselves really quali

fied members of society when we had mastered the intricacies of the Kurdish war-dance. As the evening advances they rise one by one, offer their respectful salaams, and noiselessly leave the room. We too must seek the purer, if colder, air of our tent outside.

An evening in a khân offers somewhat different and more limited attractions. Stopping one night at Severek, of all dreary Mesopotamian towns the dreariest, we rode to seek the khân under the frowning black ruins of a Crusading castle. The rain dripped from the earthen walls, and the mud splashed our faces as we floundered through the streets. In the centre of the town, surrounded by its high and repelling walls, stood the khân. The huge wooden doors were thrown open, and the mules trotted in with as much relish as their masters. On three sides of the yard inside are the stables, black, roofed-in chambers, dank, dripping, and horribly odoriferous. Part of one side had lately been given over to the accommodation of the muleteers and travellers, and, divided by mud walls, had been turned into three dark rooms. Here by night men herd together on the damp floor. This accommodation was all the khân at Severek had to offer. We preferred our tent, pitching it at the door of one of these rooms. The mud was so deep between it and the door, that we had to make a bridge of stones and planks to enter the room.

We had just settled ourselves on our camp beds in the tent-they were drier than anything else-when our first visitor arrived. Alone and under cover of night he slipped stealthily into the tent, amid the bustle of champing mules and cooking operations outside. He was the Armenian Protestant pastor. Severek had suffered terribly at the time of the massacres, and persecution and extortion, open and secret, are scarcely less acute to-day. We had

been warned that, travelling as we were under Government protection, the pastor would not dare to show his face; but, fearful and trembling, Aladjadjian Effendi came after all. He was of the most repulsive type of semi-Europeanized Armenians. He sat in his greasy black coat at the end of the camp bed, trying to save his boots from the mud, and squirmed. He asked for money to buy an organ. He believed that England would not be long in rescuing Armenia now. His nation was put here to leaven this land, to be the salt of the whole earth, in fact. She had, indeed, been an example to the world of Job's patience. As I listened, I wondered for the twentieth time that Armenia, with her martyrs and her heroes (and no nation has numbered more among her sons) can produce such offspring as these men so devoid, in spite of all they have suffered, of real feeling, conceited, officious, vulgar. The mystery is, that these very men may any day turn martyrs themselves. Many, as seemingly despicable as they, have met horrible torture with severest calm. With all their love of money, their vanity, their inordinate self-importance, they will die rather than desert the faith of their fathers. We contemplate our friend on the bed with a strange feeling of repulsion, of pity, and of admiration.

Our next visitor, a sickly weakling, with shifty green eyes and a hang-dog expression, is leader of a French-Armenian theatrical troupe, which wants to get to Diarbekr in time to perform at the Bairam feast. Being Armenians, they dare not cross Karabaghshe alone. They have waited weeks in Severek to get the necessary protection; will we give it them? Well, it is all in the day's work, and a third-rate Armenian theatre company will certainly add color, if nothing more, to the black waste we must cross between this and Diarbekr, though they may eat up more

than their share of the scant food the villagers have to offer. Yes, they can come; let them be ready by seven o'clock to-morrow morning. Next night we all camped together, a motley crew, in the most wretched khân of all our experience. The gale roared, and mules brayed in terror. Shepherds and soldiers, rough muleteers, and beautiful ladies in rose satin and green plush dresses, with high-heeled French shoes, jostled each other in the slime of the yard.

It was a relief to know that only three more stages would bring us to Diarbekr. We could get next to nothing to eat; Severek, indeed, had produced some rice, and a tough chicken; but for several days past we had lived on mouldy bread and native jam. At this time of year, the wretched villagers offered neither milk nor eggs; our clothes and bedding were soaked through and through. One of our beasts was lame from the rocks, and the men were out of heart; fear and fatigue made the muleteers captious and irritable.

On Christmas Eve, when the snow was falling, and one of the party was down with fever, we were turned out The Independent Review.

of a khân overflowing with a big camel caravan, and had to seek shelter in a damp mud village four hours short of Diarbekr. Away on every side stretched the hills, the bleak and stricken waste of Karabaghshe. Stones were littered everywhere among the rocks, melting snow half hiding their blackness; the wind howled, and the sleet drove fiercely in our faces. Far away over the barren moors, an abrupt cleft in the landscape marked the bed of the Tigris; beyond, the snow-capped mountains of Kurdistan shone in each fitful gleam of light; we had passed nothing but the half devoured remains of a camel.

On Christmas Day we rode into what seemed a City of Dreadful Night. In Diarbekr every man is armed to the teeth, except the Armenians, who scurry out of sight with scared faces. The Kurd rules with undisputed sway, and massacre seems as fitting here as it is certainly familiar. From the skies above to the stones beneath, everything is black. Battlemented walls surround the city, a frowning cliff supports it, and beneath it sweep the waters of the Tigris, a swift and troubled stream.

Victoria A. Buxton.

The fiercest battles in the intellectual warfare of the eighteenth century were fought about the name of Voltaire. More than any man of his time, he might, if he chose, have anticipated the verdict of posterity. His qualities and demerits were discussed during his lifetime with the frankness and energy which are generally reserved for those upon whom death has set its seal. Abused with fury by some, he was applanded by others with equal fury, and he lived long enough to see the world divided into the two opposing camps of Voltaireans and their enemies. Nor, when the excessive enthusiasm of his

Joseph de Maistre, on the other hand, that sturdy reactionary, the last Tory of France, could not hear Voltaire's name with patience. In his eyes the author of "Candide" was but an impudent fellow, who mistook libel for satire, whose books were poisonous, and to whose best verses no other epithet could be found than joli. He found Voltaire's face as hideous as his works. "Look," says he, "at this abject countenance, upon which shame never painted a blush, these two extinct craters which still seem to seethe with hate and luxury; this mouth, this horrible rictus, running from one ear to the other, and these lips pinched by cruel malice, ready to hurl forth blasphemy and sarcasm." What honor, indeed, should be shown such a man, save that statues should be set up to him, as M. de Maistre suggested, by the hand of the common hangman?

Time long ago softened the enthusiasm of the one side, the animosity of the other, and we can look upon Voltaire with colder, juster eye. To-day there are few men who would pay Voltaire even the compliment of a hatred as violent as De Maistre's. We no longer believe the author of "La Pucelle" the father of all evil, because we know that he had not the power, even if he had the will, to play so dangerous a part. But one thing is certainnamely, that he lived a life of more brilliant adventure than fell to the lot of any writer of his time. Hardened classic though he was, he knew by a happy experience the many sharp contrasts, the startling alternations of honor and disgrace, which make up what we call Romance. So that whatever be our opinion of his "mission," we can all find amusement in his long and spirited journey through life. Mr. Tallentyre, for instance, in his recently published "Life of Voltaire" (London: Smith, Elder & Co.), makes no attempt to define Voltaire's place in

the literature of France: he regards the hundred or more volumes which bear his name as episodes in a career of activity; and as we are not asked to take the hero of the romance quite seriously, we may delight in his exploits without afterthought. This, perhaps, is the best point of view from which to regard the life of Voltaire; and if Mr. Tallentyre had composed his book with a better sense of style and some respect for English grammar, we might congratulate him upon a notable achievement. But the biographer, even with the example of Voltaire, an eminent purist, before him, is always slipshod and inaccurate. A writer who could pen such a phrase as this, "Old Roy took occasion to sententiously point out," would have been wiser perhaps to leave the classics alone. However, Mr. Tallentyre's book covers the ground with much diligence; and if it may not be read with profit, it serves to remind us of an amazing career.

Truly Voltaire was a fortunate youth. The son of a notary, he was little more than seventeen when he had fluttered into the highest society of France. He was witty; he was gay-years afterwards the Empress Catharine called him the God of Gaiety,-and he was a poet. All doors were thrown open to him; and if the men looked askance at him, the women were enchanted by his daring and his malice. So quickly grew his fame that there was scarce a lampoon written in Paris that was not put down to the young Arouet. His father who had no other ambition for him than that he should follow respectably in his own footsteps, was miserable at the boy's success, and when he was eighteen sent him to The Hague for safety. But he travelled thither not as a notary's son, but in the train of an ambassador, the Marquis de Châteauneuf. Yet though he changed his sky his soul remained the same, and he was speedily embroiled in a dis

astrous love-affair and sent home again. Soon after his return to Paris a sojourn in the Bastile-a comfortable prison reserved for the highest in the land-set a seal upon Voltaire's gentility. There he was entertained with the polite profusion to which the king accustomed all his guests, and he emerged a far more distinguished poet than he went in. The production of "Edipe" added another leaf to his wreath of laurels, and from that dayit was in 1718-he never looked back. Nothing marred his prosperity: if literature brought him more fame than money, he knew a hundred expedients whereby to become rich; and never again did he feel the pinch of poverty. He lent money out at interest, he speculated in lotteries, and he brought upon himself what was perhaps the worst disgrace of his life by gambling in Saxon bank-notes. But, with his usual frankness, he made no secret of these employments: he knew-none betterthat a full pocket meant freedom to fight as he liked; and no scheme of his was ever balked by lack of credit. On the other hand, the charge commonly brought against him, that he was a miser, has no foundation in fact. As one of the many servants, whom he overwhelmed with generosity, confessed, he was a niggard of nothing but his time. His energy and facility were alike remarkable. He dashed off comedies, philosophical treatises, epics, and histories with an apparent carelessness which has never been equalled. Meanwhile, he found leisure, not only for business, but for the many quarrels with foolish persons which he conducted with tireless acrimony. No man ever loved fighting for its own sake better than he, and if he got the worst of it, as he frequently did, he remembered the aggressor, and waited patiently for another occasion. But there was one enemy against which he fought in vain--the government of

Paris. Not even the friendship of Madame Du Maine could protect him from banishment, and many years of his life were passed in enforced absence from the capital he loved so well, and upon which he cast so brilliant a lustre.

But Voltaire had the faculty of turning even his misfortunes to good account. He showed a finer sense of drama in his life than in his works. An insult, such as that offered him by the Duc de Rohan, became under his management a distinction. Voltaire's epigram against his adversary outlived the violence which it occasioned, and Voltaire arrived in England, a fugitive for the first time, with all the honor which well-advertised notoriety could give him. Thus he arranged the scenic effects of his life as other men stagemanage a theatre, and good fortune always came to his aid. His appearance in London was opportune in a double sense. Not only had Voltaire's fame preceded him, but he came in the nick of time to witness the obsequies of his master Newton, and to note that in England men of science were buried like kings. Nor did he waste his days in idleness: he surmounted the craggy difficulties of the English tongue, which he wrote with a timid propriety, and in which he conversed with ease; he visited the Court, and made the acquaintance of the King and his Ministers; he was splendidly entertained by Peterborough and Bolingbroke; the kindly Swift collected subscriptions for his "Henriade"; he made the acquaintance of all the poets of our Augustan agePope and Congreve, Gay and Thomson; he dined with Lord Chesterfield, and sought from the great Duchess of Marlborough information for his projected "Siècle de Louis XIV." Surely no Frenchman was ever better received even in hospitable London, and he repaid the debt with an enthusiastic appreciation of England and the English. Moreover, did he not discover Shake