On May 8th our boat reached Hull at dusk, but she could not enter the docks before the next morning. Next day, early in the morning, I landed, and the captain's sister-in-law kindly accompanied me, took me to the station, and put me into a train for London. On the journey I was delighted and wonderstruck with the beauty of the scenery, the high state of cultivation visible, the canals and the railways, with what seemed to me a prodigious number of trains constantly passing to and fro, the activity apparent at the crowded stations, and many signs of prosperity everywhere, all of which were then strange to me. Already I could perceive how great a difference existed between little England and large but poverty-stricken Asia Minor. If an Englishman of the eighteenth century could rise out of his grave and see what I saw on that day, his bewilderment at the advancement of his country would not, I think, be greater than was mine. At every large station I anxiously tried to find out whether we were in London. At one place, putting some of the few English words I knew together, I made up an interrogatory sentence, and addressed it to a middle-aged well-dressed lady who was sitting opposite me in the carriage. I wanted to ask her whether we were far from London. The lady could not understand my meaning, and turning her face towards the other people in the carriage she said, with a thoroughly unsympathetic air, "Foreigner!" I remember this word so well. I was sadly impressed by this lady's rudeness. She was quite right in saying I was a foreigner, but I was not one of those foreigners who are so narrow-minded as to think evilly of a whole nation because they have been treated rudely or without sympathy by one or more of its members. Happily she could not know I was a Turk, as, like most of her class, she would probably have taken for Turks those short, dark, shabby persons, with turban or fez, who occasionally come to this country from different corners of the vast Orient. If she had known I was a real Turk, a member of the much maligned nation, against which her Christian heart must needs have been full of mediæval prejudices, I fancy her rudeness towards me would probably have been still more marked.
Fashion
The Diary of a Turk — Part 85
2026-11-16 06:29:49 · The Daily Ledger
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