... I added the two hundred dollars to the money I had already saved up for a pleasure trip I had grown accustomed to making every August. So I visited some of the cities of Germany and Austria and reached Istanbul, where I found awaiting me a letter from Gibran in which he said:

"... You are of course happy in the city of caesars and sultans, standing like a question mark between East and West. However matters may turn, you will come back from the resting-place of happiness filled with the ghosts of bygone generations and the phantoms of the nations of today...

"In the Astana there are many things that call for study and demand contemplation, chief among them the ancient churches and mosques, with their Byzantine carvings and the paintings that came before the age of the Italian Renaissance... Beware of leaving the Astana before you have studied it well. No doubt the Imperial Museum holds precious Greek and Roman

antiquities; look at them, and remember me when you stand before something tremendous in its beauty and beautiful in its terror...

"And how did you find the Syrians in the Astana? Did you find them among the living who move, or the dead who stand still? The Syrian, Youssef, is a ewe in his own country and a lion abroad. If this saying holds true of the Syrians of the Astana, then give Syria tidings of a manifest victory..."

Here I shall pass swiftly, without dwelling at all on the marvels I beheld during my journey to the Astana and elsewhere. But I remained in constant touch with Gibran, conveying to him by correspondence my chief artistic impressions — more than there is room to mention here... I continued my travels to Athens, then Rome, and returned to Paris by way of Florence and Geneva, to find Gibran absorbed in preparing some of his canvases to show at the Autumn Salon... Gibran was visibly anxious and careworn. His economic circumstances might force him to return to Boston, and it mattered greatly to him, before that, to have exhibited something at the Paris salon...

Of his paintings Gibran submitted the one "Borne on the Arms of the Angels" and two others; only one of them was accepted... but its lot was one of the secondary corridors, not the grand hall as he had hoped.

In the evening Gibran laid bare to me the cares of his heart, saying: "Rodin is bound to visit the salon,

Youssef, and how I long to show him something of my work and to hear from his lips a word of appreciation that would find an echo in American society... He never comes, as you know, except surrounded by a company of American ladies, and it will not do for my picture to be shown in the corridor... That is impossible!" And Gibran sprang to his feet and began pacing the room nervously...

— "Take it easy, Gibran. The matter is simpler than you imagine. Let us spit on a dollar, and I guarantee

that the guard will move the picture inside the hall"... And so it was!

I was standing on the other side of the hall when Rodin passed by like a demigod! Fluttering about him was a flock of perfumed ladies, like a bevy of houris in long, flowing gowns,