220 JOURNEYS IN PERSIA LETTER xxvi

on high ground, well timbered, and the glimpses through
the trees of the mountains and the plain are enchanting.

Through the kindness of my friends at Hamadan, who
had written in advance, I am made welcome in the house
of Dr. Shedd, the Principal of the Urmi College.1

Within two hours of my arrival I had the pleasure of
visits from Canon Maclean and Mr. Lang of the English
Mission, and from Dr. Labaree and the ladies of the
Fiske Seminary, the English, French, and American
missionaries being the only European residents in Urmi.

I. L. B.

1 It is a pleasant duty to record here the undeserved and exceeding
kindness that I have met with from the American, Presbyterian, and
Congregational missionaries in Persia and Asia Minor. It is not only
that they made a stranger, although a member of the Anglican Church,
welcome in their refined and cultured homes, often putting themselves
to considerable inconvenience in order to receive me, but that they un-
grudgingly imparted to me the interests of their work and lives, helping
me at the cost of much valuable time and trouble with the complicated
and often difficult arrangements for my farther journeys, showing (in
every possible way that they "know the heart of a stranger," being
themselves " strangers in a strange land." Specially, I feel bound to
acknowledge the kindness and hospitality shown to me by the Presbyterian
missionaries in Urmi, who were aware that one object of my journey
through North-West Persia was to visit the Archbishop of Canterbury's
Assyrian Missions, which work on different and, I may say, opposite lines
from their own.