With one family I dined quite often--the usual interminable Oriental feast
varying only from the Arab or Turkish dinners in a few special national
dishes. All, excepting the aged grandmother, spoke French, and the
daughters had a thorough grounding in the literature. Such English books
as they knew they had read in French translations. The house was
attractively furnished, with really beautiful rugs and old silverware. The
younger generation played bridge, and the girls were always well dressed
in European fashion. Whence the clothes came was a mystery, for nothing
could have been brought in since the war, and even in ante-bellum days
foreign clothes of that grade could never have been stocked but must have
been imported in individual orders. The evenings were thoroughly
enjoyable, for everything was in such marked contrast to our every-day
life. It must be remembered that these few Armenians were the only women
with whom we could talk and laugh in Occidental fashion.

By far the best-informed and cleverest Arab was Père Anastase. He was a
Catholic, and under the supervision of the Political Department edited the
local Arab paper. All his life he had worked building up a
library--gathering rare books throughout Syria and Mesopotamia. He was
himself an author of no small reputation. Just before the British took
Baghdad the Germans pillaged his collection, sending the more valuable
books to Constantinople and Berlin, and turning the rest over to the
populace. The soldiers made great bonfires of many--others found their way
to the bazaars, where he was later able to repurchase some of them. When
talking of the sacking of his house, Père Anastase would work himself into
a white heat of fury and his eyes would flash as he bitterly cursed the
vandals who had destroyed his treasures.

It was in Baghdad that I first ran into Major E.B. Soane, whose _Through
Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise_ is a classic. Soane was born in