d that the women might stay behind,
but the men, high and low, must go. They came flocking to the embassy,
already besought for weeks by French Sisters of Mercy and Armenians in
distress, some begging for a chance to escape, some ready to go anywhere
as their share of the war. The Turks were finally induced to include
only those between twenty and forty, and at the last moment this was cut
to an even fifty--twenty-five British subjects, twenty-five French. The
plan eliminated, naturally, the better-known remnants of the French and
English colonies, and disappointed the chief of police, who had not
unreasonably hoped, as he wistfully put it, "to have some notables." Of
the fifty probably not more than a dozen had been born in England or
France, the others being natives of Malta, Greece--the usual Levantines.
Yet if these young bank clerks and tradesmen were not "important,"
according to newspaper standards, they were, presumably, important to
themselves. They were very important, indeed, to the wives and mothers
and sisters who fought up to the Galata sea wall that Thursday morning,
weeping and wailing, and waving their wet handkerchiefs through the iron
fence.

The hostages, one or two of whom had been called to their doors during
the night and marched away without time to take anything with them, had
been put aboard a police boat, about the size of a New York revenue
cutter, and herded below in two little cabins, with ten fierce-looking
Constantinople policemen, in gray astrakhan caps, to guard them. It was
from the water-line port-holes of these cabins that they waved their
farewells.

With them was a sturdy, bearded man in black knickerbockers and clerical
hat, the rector of the Crimean Chapel in Constantinople--a Cambridge and
Church of England man, and a one-time dweller in the wilds of Kurdistan,
who, though not called, had volunteered to go. The first secretary of
the American embassy, Mr. Hoffman Philip, an adventurous humanitarian,
whose experience includes an English university, the Rough Riders, and
service as American minister to Abyssinia, also volunteered, not, of
course, as hostage, but as friendly assistant both to the Turkish
authorities and to their prisoners.

To him was given the little deck-cabin, large enough for a man to
stretch out on the seat which ran round it; here, also the clergyman
volunteer was presently permitted, and here too, thanks to passports
vouch-safed by the chief of poli