eat for bread and new shirts and skirts and other clothes
for the Armenians whom he had always hated, and never lose a single
parcel?

Why did he do it?

This is the reason. Before the war when he was ill in the hospital
Miss Cushman had nursed him with the help of her Armenian girls, and
had made him better; he was so thankful that he would just run to do
anything that she wished him to do.

_To Stay or not to Stay?_

But at last Miss Cushman--worn out with all this work--fell ill with
a terrible fever. For some time it was not certain that she would not
die of it; for a whole month she lay sick in great weakness. President
Wilson had at this time broken off relations between America and
Turkey. The Turk now thought of the American as an enemy; and Miss
Cushman was an American. She was in peril. What was she to do?

"It is not safe to stay," said her friends. "You will be practically a
prisoner of war. You will be at the mercy of the Turks. You know what
the Turk is--as treacherous as he is cruel. They can, if they wish,
rob you or deport you anywhere they like. Go now while the path is
open--before it is too late. You are in the very middle of Turkey,
hundreds of miles from any help. The dangers are terrible."

As soon as she was well enough Miss Cushman went to the Turkish
Governor of Konia, a bitter Mohammedan who had organised the massacre
of forty thousand Armenians, to say that she had been asked to go back
to America.

"What shall you do if I stay?" she asked.

"I beg you to stay," said the Governor. "You shall be protected. You
need have no fear."

"Your words are beautiful," she replied. "But if American and Turkey
go to war you will deport me."

If she stayed she knew the risks under his rule. She was still weak
from her illness. There was no colleague by her side to help her.
There seemed to be every reason why she should sail away back to
America. But as she sat thinking it over she saw before her the
hospital full of wounded soldiers, the six hundred orphans who looked
to her for help, the plain of a hundred villages to which she was
sending food. No one could take her place.

Yet she was weak and tired after her illness and, in America, rest and
home, friends and safety called to her.

"It was," she wrote later to her friends, "a heavy problem to know
what to do with the orphans and other helpless people who depended on
me for life."

What would you have done? What do you think she did