III. 



ISKANDER EFFENDI. 



" It is somewhat strange that you people have known 

 me so long and have known so little about me. But that 

 is the way of the world. I have had nothing to conceal, 

 and it only happens that you never before put the ques- 

 tion to me plainly, 'Have you a story to tell?' Every 

 one of you, doubtless, could tell a personal history fully as 

 strange as mine, for there is a vast deal of romance in the 

 most ordinary lives, and there is no man or woman in the 

 most quiet country place in America whose life has not 

 been marked by one or another event which has in it all 

 the elements of what we call the romantic. These events 

 may have occurred in the old farm-house, in the village 

 home, in the brown-stone city house, or — as mine — in dis- 

 tant countries. My story, stripped of the local interests 

 which make it seem strange to American life, is a very 

 common story ; but I confess that sometimes when I am 

 leading this calm and delicious existence of ours in the 

 Rookery, I have hard work to realize my personal identity 

 with the man whom you, I think, will be surprised to hear 

 was once Iskander Effendi, merchant in Jerusalem. You 

 know that I am a Hebrew by birth. My father's family 

 had lived in England, and he came thence to New York, 

 bringing with him all his property. I was brought up as 

 an only child. Educated with care and expense, sent 



