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“Can’t you do something?” I asked Naim one day.

“They will go away when it is cold,” he replied with the philosophy of the true Turk.

“Cure or endure is also my motto,” I told him, smiling, “but I never endure before I’ve made a fine attempt to cure.”

On another occasion, my energies were not rewarded with true Christian gratitude or tact. I was busy as usual, when an orthodox lady who had given her nationality as “Catholic,” and was staying in Smyrna by special dispensation of the Turks, said to a Greek neighbour: “Look at this lady slaughtering flies, as her friends the Turks slaughter Christians.”

“Madame,” said I, “I have passed this morning among the ruins to which your ‘Christians’ have reduced this city.” I had yet to see the hideous devastation in Anatolia!

There were about two or three hundred business men in the hotel, waiting to learn their fate. They divided themselves into three distinct groups, in three different mess rooms. First, the silent, water-drinking, go-to-bed-at-nine Turks, in the library. Secondly, Americans, in the smoking-room, who left their allegiance to prohibition on the other side of the Atlantic; singing and dancing to the accompaniment of a banjo till the small hours of the morning. Thirdly, at a long table in the dining-room, sat the rest of us—principally business men—Italian, Spanish, Dutch, South American, Frenchmen, or Danes. My only fellow-countryman informed me that among other complications he had come to Smyrna to arrange, he has somehow to explain away the disappearance of 50,000 gallons of pure alcohol, sent from Cuba to Smyrna via New York. The officials in New York had helped themselves to the precious nectar, and sent the cargo on to Smyrna, refilled with water! Such are the trials of prohibition!