356 JOURNEYS IN KURDISTAN LETTER xxxii

look of home. With them " Love is the fulfilling of the
law "—love in every tone, look, and touch, and they have ,
that true maternity of spirit which turns a school into a
family, and trains as well as educates. They are now
educating the children, and even grandchildren, of their
earliest pupils, and have the satisfaction of seeing how
very much their school has effected in permeating the
household and social relationships of the Armenian
women with the tone of Christian discipleship, so that
one would scarcely hear from the lips of any of their
married pupils the provoking question, ""We are only
women, what can we do ?" Many of them have gone
to homes in the roughest and wildest of mountain
villages, where they sweeten village life by the gentle
and kindly ways acquired in the Bitlis school. These
ladies conduct a mothers' meeting, and I thought that
the women were much developed in intelligence and
improved in manner as compared with the usual run of
Armenian women. On being asked to address them, I
took' their own words for my text, " We are only women,"
etc., and found them intelligent and sympathetic.

These ladies have endured great hardships, and their
present position is one of continual deprivation and
frequent risk. One of them was so severely stoned in
Bitlis that she fell unconscious from her horse. In the

winter Miss -------- itinerates among the Armenian

villages of the Mush and Eahwan Plains and the lake
shore, travelling over the crust of the enormously deep
snow in a hand-sled drawn by a man, braving storms
which have nearly cost her her life, sleeping and living
for a month or more at a time chiefly in odaJis, and
fearlessly encountering the very roughest of Kurds and
others in these dim and crowded stables. The danger
of village expeditions, and the difficulty of obtaining
zaptiehs without considerable expense, have increased of