a tragically mean garb. And soon after I learned that he had vanished
unwept into eternal oblivion.

An Arabian Nights touch was imparted to the dissolving panorama by
strange visitants from Tartary and Kurdistan, Korea and Aderbeijan,
Armenia, Persia, and the Hedjaz--men with patriarchal beards and
scimitar-shaped noses, and others from desert and oasis, from Samarkand
and Bokhara. Turbans and fezzes, sugar-loaf hats and headgear resembling
episcopal miters, old military uniforms devised for the embryonic armies
of new states on the eve of perpetual peace, snowy-white burnooses,
flowing mantles, and graceful garments like the Roman toga, contributed
to create an atmosphere of dreamy unreality in the city where the
grimmest of realities were being faced and coped with.

Then came the men of wealth, of intellect, of industrial enterprise, and
the seed-bearers of the ethical new ordering, members of economic
committees from the United States, Britain, Italy, Poland, Russia,
India, and Japan, representatives of naphtha industries and far-off coal
mines, pilgrims, fanatics, and charlatans from all climes, priests of
all religions, preachers of every doctrine, who mingled with princes,
field-marshals, statesmen, anarchists, builders-up, and pullers-down.
All of them burned with desire to be near to the crucible in which the
political and social systems of the world were to be melted and recast.
Every day, in my walks, in my apartment, or at restaurants, I met
emissaries from lands and peoples whose very names had seldom been heard
of before in the West. A delegation from the Pont-Euxine Greeks called
on me, and discoursed of their ancient cities of Trebizond, Samsoun,
Tripoli, Kerassund, in which I resided many years ago, and informed me
that they, too, desired to become welded into an independent Greek
republic, and had come to have their claims allowed. The Albanians were