acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

392 ACROSS ASTA MINOR ON FOOT
American school in all things, with an American
staff, planted in this out-of-the-way Turkish city.
A school out of the ordinary, too, even of its kind,
with high aspirations and a tone and style and
atmosphere for students to assimilate ; it left its
influence unmistakably upon all such who entered
its doors. This bright, most excellent American
school—American even to its furnishings and pianos
and hot- water heating apparatus—made special efforts
to attract the daughters of Moslems, and succeeded
better than any other Mission school in the interior.
To secure Moslem students is the most difficult task
that a Mission school knows, and any considerable
measure of success in it is a great achievement.
Close to the Mission is a Home for Armenian
Orphans, conducted by a Scottish lady widely known
in the work. The work itself is peculiar to the
country as the direct outcome of massacres. After
each such outbreak there are orphans to be cared
for w^ho otherwise would perish. At this Home they
were fed and clothed and schooled, taught trades and
put on the way of supporting themselves, and might
be seen making carpets and embroidery, at which
some had attained great dexterity.
In Marash is also a German Mission in which His
Excellency at Baghche took interest, and to which
he had given me letters, A German Mission carries
with it all the German characteristics just as strongly
as any secular form of national activity. Its sense
of ordered excellence is oppressive ;
you feel that
everything is done by explicit rule ; that nothing is
left to chance and little to personal judgment. The
German hospital especially was overpowering in its
atmosphere of science and rule and formula combined
with an incessant striving after perfection ; it carried
a flavour, too, of representing the German Empire
for the benefit of all observers. The hospital was
a small one, and seemed to have been brought to the
perfection of an exact well-regulated machine. The
rough compulsory improvisations of American Mission