Excerpt: ...pupils remained in the Seminary for protection during the storm; yet even there they were not wholly safe. On the 25th of August, a messenger came in haste for one of them, saying that her dying brother wished to see her immediately. As the man was her relative, the girl was ready to go at once; but providentially Miss Fiske learned that the brother was well, and the messenger had been seen last with Mar Shimon. So he left, chagrined and enraged at his failure. The patriarch had told him to be sure and hide his purpose from that Satan, Miss Fiske, and in case of failure, to take the girl by force. But the teacher had had some experience in guarding her fold, and both she and her pupil were thankful for the deliverance. Next day, Mar Shimon forbade preaching in Geog Tapa; but if the church was closed, the house-tops remained open. The same day, the school in Vizierawa was repeatedly dispersed, but each time reassembled by the teacher. The 28th of this month was such a day as the mission had never seen before. In the forenoon, the teacher from Charbash fled wounded from the servants of Mar Shimon to the mission premises. Scarcely had he entered, when his brother came in, having escaped from similar violence. The Moslem owner of the village had to put a stop to the tearing down of their house. Miss Fiske and Miss Rice had just sat down to dinner with the school, when the cry, "A man is killed!" was followed by a rush from all parts of the yard. A mob at the gate was trying to break in and seize the native helpers. Mar Yohanan was wounded, and all was confusion. The teachers exhorted their little flock not to count their lives dear to them, for Jesus' sake. Happily, they were not called to such a test of discipleship; but the sympathies of the Moslems were plainly with Mar Shimon, and no one knew what a day might bring forth. That tried friend of the mission, E.W. Stevens, Esq., English consul at Tabreez, feared lest the missionaries should fall by the...

Our Savior bade his disciples gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost; and many who have known of Miss Fiske's fifteen years of labor for women in Persia, have desired her to prepare for publication the facts now presented to the reader. The writer was one of these; and it was only when he found that she could not do it, that he attempted it, in accordance with her wishes, simply that these interesting records of divine grace might not be lost. The materials have been drawn from the letters and conversations of those familiar with the scenes described, and especially from Miss Fiske. In all cases, the language of others has been condensed, as much as is consistent, with the truthful expression of their ideas; and, in the translation of the letters of Nestorians, it has not been deemed essential to follow slavishly every Syriac idiom, for, instead of these letters owing their interest, as some have supposed, to their translators, they may have sometimes rather suffered from renderings needlessly idiomatic.