preferable to the tattered remnants hanging about these people, and among the smaller children puris naturalis is the rule.  It is also quite evident that few of them ever take a bath; as there is plenty of water about them, this doubtless comes of the pure contrariness of human nature in the absence of social obligations.  Their religion teaches these people that they ought to bathe every day; consequently, they never bathe at all.  There is a small threshing-floor handy, and, taking pity on their wretched condition, I hesitate not to “drive dull care away” from them for a few minutes, by giving them an exhibition; not that there is any “dull care” among them, though, after all; for, in spite of desperate poverty, they know more contentment than the well-fed, respectably-dressed mechanic of the Western World.  It is, however, the contentment born of not realizing their own condition, the bliss that comes of ignorance.  They search the entire village for eatables, but nothing is readily obtainable but bread.  A few gaunt, angular fowls are scratching about, but they have a beruffled, disreputable appearance, as though their lives had been a continuous struggle against being caught and devoured; moreover, I don’t care to wait around three hours on purpose to pass judgment on these people’s cooking.  Eggs there are none; they are devoured, I fancy, almost before they are laid.  Finally, while making the best of bread and water, which is hardly made more palatable by the appearance of the people watching me feed — a woman in an airy, fairy costume, that is little better than no costume at all, comes forward, and contributes a small bowl of yaort; but, unfortuntaely, this is old yaort, yaort that is in the sere and yellow stage of its usefulness as human food; and although these people doubtless consume it thus, I prefer to wait until something more acceptable and less odoriferous turns up.  I miss the genial hospitality of the gentle Koords to-day.  Instead of heaping plates of pillau, and bowls of wholesome new yaort, fickle fortune brings me nothing but an exclusive diet of bread and water.  My road, this afternoon, is a tortuous donkey-trail, intersecting ravines with well-nigh perpendicular sides, and rocky ridges, covered with a stunted growth of cedar and scrub-oak.  The higher mountains round about are heavily timbered with pine and cedar.  A large forest on a mountain-slope is on fire, and I pass a camp of people who have been driven out of their permanent abode by the flames.  Fortunately, they have saved everything except their naked houses and their grain.  They can easily build new houses, and their neighbors will give or lend them sufficient grain to tide them over till another harvest.  Toward sundown the hilly country terminates, and I descend into a broad cultivated valley, through which is a very good wagon-road; and I have the additional satisfaction of learning that it will so continue clear into Sivas, a wagon-road having been made from Sivas