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AFTERNOON IN KESWICK

It began as another conventional journey of the kind which, four years earlier, had led to an 'illustrated lecture on "Travels through Europe" in Overbrook Church, tickets 25 cents, by the Revd F. N. D. Buchman'. Seville, Granada, Monaco, Cairo, Jerusalem, Athens, Constantinople, Vienna - it was a Grand Tour on a grand scale. The only trouble, as he said afterwards, was that 'I took myself with me'. Wherever he went, to the Alhambra, to the Greek islands in their shimmering, pellucid sea, to the Holy Places themselves, he felt harried and burdened by the unassuaged bitterness of his rejection by the Board. Off the island of Patmos, he said to a fellow-traveller, 'I'll never forgive those men.'

It seemed to him as if the Care personified in Horace's Ode - 'Black Care takes her seat behind the horseman' - was riding with him. 'I could feel its breath on the back of my neck,' he recalled. Often he felt more like a fugitive than a tourist. But, on the surface, he appeared cheerful most of the time. He took genuine interest in those around him, and people enjoyed his company. Travelling through the Mediterranean, he met an elderly American couple, the Dulls from Harrisburg in Pennsylvania; and, when Mrs Dull fell so seriously ill with pneumonia that she had to leave the ship at Athens, Buchman abandoned his own plans in order to look after them. He called on the American Embassy to report on Mrs Dull's progress and was invited to an Embassy party. There, a woman who had met him on the ship introduced him to Miss Angelique Contostavlos, Lady-in-Waiting to Crown Princess Sophie of Greece. Miss Contostavlos was interested by his kindness to the Dulls, and told her mistress about him. 'Today', she said, 'I met an American saint.'

'Impossible,' replied the Crown Princess. 'I'd like to meet him.'

Princess Sophie herself was, evidently, also much taken with Buchman: enough, anyway, to express a hope that he might help Greece and Turkey live at peace together and to arrange for him to meet the Turkish Sultan, Abdul Hamid, in Istanbul. Buchman seems to have taken this remarkable suggestion in his stride, and later described how he had been 'sent down in an armoured car - two men on the step, two men on the box' to the Sultan's reception. He also had breakfast with the Sultan.1

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