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 CHAPTER XII

HOW I WAS SOLD TO ST GEORGE

Shortly after Semmeya's wedding an epidemic of typhoid fever swept over Constantinople. Owing to our unsanitary drainage conditions such epidemics were not rare. All four of us had the fever. With me it was so acute, and lasted so long, that the doctors gave me up as a sickly child who had not the strength to battle for health. My lengthy illness left me alive, it is true, but as a fire leaves standing a structure which it has completely destroyed within. Apparently there remained nothing solid to build on. The doctors intimated as much when they said I might eat and do what pleased me—and went away.

To them I was only a hopeless patient. It was different with my mother: she would not give up the fight.

In her despair, and when science failed her, she turned to what in reality she always had more faith in—her religion, and particularly her favourite saint, St George of the Bells. Him she had inherited from the paternal side of her family,