Though they are Osmanli Turks, the women of these small villages appear to make little pretence of covering their faces.  Among themselves they constitute, as it were, one large family gathering, and a stranger is but seldom seen.  They are apparently simple-minded females, just a trifle shame-faced in their demeanor before a stranger, sitting apart by themselves while listening to the conversation between myself and the men.  This, of course, is very edifying, even apart from its pantomimic and monosyllabic character, for I am now among a queer people, a people through the unoccupied chambers of whose unsophisticated minds wander strange, fantastic thoughts.  One of the transient horsemen, a contemplative young man, the promising appearance of whose upper lip proclaims him something over twenty, announces that he likewise is on the way to Yuzgat; and after listening attentively to my explanations of how a wheelman climbs mountains and overcomes stretches of bad road, he solemnly inquires whether a ’cycler could scurry up a mountain slope all right if some one were to follow behind and touch him up occasionally with a whip, in the persuasive manner required in driving a horse.  He then produces a rawhide “persuader,” and ventures the opinion that if he followed close behind me to Yuzgat, and touched me up smartly with it whenever we came to a mountain, or a sandy road, there would be no necessity of trundling any of the way.  He then asks, with the innocent simplicity of a child, whether in case he made the experiment, I would get angry and shoot him.

The other transient appears of a more speculative turn of mind, and draws largely upon his own pantomimic powers and my limited knowledge of Turkish, to ascertain the difference between the katch lira of a bicycle at retail, and the hatch lira of its manufacture.  From the amount of mental labor he voluntarily inflicts upon himself to acquire this particular item of information, I apprehend that nothing less than wild visions of acquiring a rapid fortune by starting a bicycle factory at Angora, are flitting through his imaginative mind.  The villagers themselves seem to consider me chiefly from the standpoint of their own peculiar ideas concerning the nature of an Englishman’s feelings toward a Russian.  My performance on the roof has put them in the best of humor, and has evidently whetted their appetites for further amusement.  Pointing to a stolid-looking individual, of an apparently taciturn disposition, and who is one of the respectably-dressed few, they accuse him of being a Eussiau; and then all eyes are turned towards me, as though they quite expect to see me rise up wrathfully and make some warlike demonstration against him.  My undemonstrative disposition forbids so theatrical a proceeding, however, and I confine myself to making a pretence of falling into the trap, casting furtive glances of suspicion towards the supposed hated subject of the Czar, and making whispered inquiries of my immediate neighbors