The college at Marash is on the Mount Holyoke plan. There has been another college for women on the Mount Holyoke plan at Bitlis for more than forty years, where two noble women, the Ely sisters, have been training wives and mothers for the passing and the coming generations. Their usefulness cannot be even estimated.

There is a school for girls at Smyrna, founded in 1881, with 250 students, and another at Adabazar, eighty miles from Constantinople, with about one hundred students.

A very promising American institution in Turkey is St. Paul’s College, at the ancient city of Tarsus, with a preparatory department known as St. Paul’s Academy, founded by the late Elliott F. Shepherd of New York and chartered by the legislature of that state in 1887. Dr. Howard Crosby was the first president of the board of trustees. He was succeeded by Dr. Henry Mitchell MacCracken, chancellor of the University of New York. Daniel W. McWilliams is secretary, Frederick A. Booth is treasurer, and William Jay Schieffelin, a son-in-law of the late Colonel Shepherd, is the other member of the board. The academy was opened in the fall of 1888, the college in the following year, and the first class graduated in June, 1893.

St. Paul’s is not a sectarian institution and is intended primarily to train young men in that part of Turkey to be useful citizens, with a foundation of Christian learning. The language of the schools is English, the faculty are all Christians, and most of them are Americans, and every year a number of the graduating class go up to the theological seminaries of the American Board, or the medical department of the Presbyterian College at Beirut.

Tarsus, which, you will remember, was the birthplace of St. Paul, is a thriving city, eighteen miles from the Mediterranean on the river Cydnus, and is connected by rail with both Mersina, the port of the province of Cilicia and Adana. The buildings of the institute occupy an elevation in the suburbs and command a fascinating view of a great plain and a long line of the Taurus Mountains in the background. There is no other institution for higher education within a six days’ journey, and the educational boom that has recently broken out in Turkey has caused a rush of students from the most influential families in that part of the empire. Unfortunately only a few of them can be taken care of. The capacity of the college is limited.

THE END

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.


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