aid meant nothing more than spiritual solidarity, for the country was empty of national women's organizations, for all the abundance of its circles of charity and good works.

Then the gunpowder crackled in August of '914. And after that the hearts of the Turks were seized with dread, in fear for the existence of an empire in whose bounty and shade they had basked for four hundred years. They were afraid — they had seen with their own eyes the signs of collapse — and they began striking at the free men, striking blindly; and the hammers fell — fell first of all — upon the kinswomen of those detained before the court-martial, whose fate was known from the first minutes.

And the gallows of the martyrs were raised in the square that today bears their name! In the women's quarters, behind the curtains, there were tender hearts that learned early of an anguish beneath which men's shoulders buckle! And she who did not weep, on that black day, for a brother or a kinsman, wept for the brother of a friend or the kinsman of a companion, or for a dear compatriot among the soldiers of the vanguard.

That day! I remember it gray and damp as the abyss; and I remember a day before it, cold as frost — I remember the hour Enver Pasha passed through the streets of Beirut, crossed Burj Square, and stood for a minute muttering between his lips:

"Here I shall hang your sons, O Beirut, city of rebels."

And they hanged them, after hunting them down as young squabs are hunted.

I am in my room, silently reading the government's offi-cial communiqué. Here is my companion, Mari Yanni Ata Allah, reading a letter written by a friend on the eve of the execution, while our tears fall hot upon our cheeks, and our souls compose a silent elegy for freedom and for the free!