[October, 1895. Sent to Constantinople: After Greek Islands.] ... Where are you, I wonder? - not at Samboul, I hope, where is rioting and wild work. Such a lovely letter you writ me that I have read many a time - so true that you are in heartbreaking lands I wouldn't go to for worlds. If ever I travel it shall be to Chicago. I don't want to have my heart broken by the East; better one's head broken by the vulgar West. Those monks were dirty and low and dropped aitches because they belong to a dissenting establishment - for I hope you know that the Eastern Church fell away lamentably from the true faith - and have no Filioque and keep Easter at the wrong time, and are very heretical about sculptured imagery so that a curse has been upon them; and their monks are dirty and their clergy marry - which is a disgusting practice and leads God only knows where ... You must stay at Mount Athos - must. In and out of the crannies and sea heights are seven-and-twenty fenced monasteries, and they hold the secret of a thousand things dead to us about which I will tell you one time - soon. I daresay all the mountains are very beautiful, and old isn't the word for them. No, don't go to look at Troy - but if you can find Niobe on Mount Sipylus - with her jar of tears - cut out of the mountain side in a spirit of "wild enormity"; you could tell me about it and fire my heart and make me young. There was a sculptor in the days of Alexander the Great who offered to carve Mount Athos into a statue that should hold a city of a thousand people in his right hand and pour cascades from a jar in his left hand; and that mean-minded monarch bent on vulgar conquest refused the money. But only artists are really royal ... At Smyrna you are near magnesia, an ancient city - tremble not at its name, the terrors of infancy are over - (only just over for you) - and if you leave the lake to the left and turn southwards through the first great defile of Sipylus, by and by you come to Niobe - carved into the mountain-side and weeping torrents of tears. Many a wonder there is to see, but it's a rough land now, if you coast on the Caramanian shores - there is a great wonder called Aspendus on the River Eurymidon, but that is down in Pisidia - how I want to see them, and will in the next life. ...