PREFACE
in Paris, and Christmas was no sooner past than we had the famous flood of 1910, when a quarter of the city was under water.
There was nothing dull about our life of three years in Constantinople. First came the cholera epidemic; the Effendi, my little son, was born in a house where the neighbors on one side had cholera and those on the other side small-pox. Then the war between Turkey and Italy; more cholera; huge fires which destroyed whole quarters of the city; and finally the First Balkan War, when ten thousand wounded men came into the city in a single day, St. Sophia was filled with a mixture of thousands of refugees and cholera stricken soldiers, and I sheltered myself from a west wind on a hillside above my home and listened with grim satisfaction to the Christian guns of the Balkan Allies thundering at the gates of the city. Then the Chellabi[1] sent me back to Paris,
- ↑ "Chellabi" Turkish for "master of the house."
[x]
