Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 1.djvu/55

Rh toms and practices he enumerated which no more applied to us than they did to his own communion. I saw at once that he was confounding us with the Independents, some of whose tracts he had read, and that he had no idea of any other English Church than that which he himself had described. Fortunately he read modern Greek remarkably well, and taking out the only copy of our book of Common Prayer in that language which I possessed,—one of the last edition printed by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,—I succeeded in proving to him the existence of a Church in England with doctrines, rites, and ceremonies, different from those which he had attributed to her. The youth was delighted in the extreme, and begged so hard for the Greek copy of our ritual that I presented it to him. The distribution of our Prayer Book in the Eastern language is an excellent means of making the native Christians better acquainted with our Church.

Our interview lasted till midnight, but our kind visitors did not suffer us to depart on the morrow without sending us a token of their remembrance in a present of excellent apples and several loaves of Frank bread.

The principal product of Amâsia is silk, of which six hundred bales are annually exported to Europe.

Oct. 6th.—We started from Amâsia at 7 a.m., and continued our journey through the well-cultivated valley, at some distance from the river. When about one hour from the town our muleteers pointed out to us a small ruined building, beneath which he said was a spring of water, believed by the Greeks to have gushed forth miraculously when the corpse of S. Chrysostom was laid upon the spot, as it was being borne in triumph to Constantinople from Comana Pontica, the place of his exile and death.

After leaving the valley, our road lay over uncultivated plains bounded by low hills, sometimes barren and sometimes scantily covered with furze. At 1, we put up at the Mohammedan village of Ina Bazaar, containing about thirty mud huts and a small mosque. Here we were lodged in the Konagh, or house which the villagers in these districts provide for the accommodation of government officials, or for other travellers, in order not to be subjected to the inconvenience and impositions with