F. F. Irving, a priest in the Church of England, was for five years, 1893-1898, a member of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Mission to the Assyrian Church of the East. He spent most of this time in Ula, an isolated Christian village about 70 km north of the city of Urmia in Persia. His duties did not press him too hard there, and he used his spare time to write sketches of the life and customs of the local Assyrians as he experienced them. It is these lively and attractive sketches, originally published in the Quarterly Paper of the Mission, that are reprinted here, edited with an introduction by J. F. Coakley.