in England, except one managing clerk, is engaged in any business that England is carrying on; but every man is engaged in reading what is day by day printed as news. You know that there is a Patlegan. No Englishman knows it. He cannot see, touch, handle; every event with him is in the clouds.

"But you have a great Megilis."

This is the

The Megilis is what the people are. way. The English Reis Effendi writes to Consul Wood, or Rose: "Divide the Mountain." On this the Consul Wood or Rose or Moore sets to work. Nobody knows anything about it but that Reis Effendi and that Consul, and sometimes perhaps, a little, the Ambassador. You get up one morning and cut each other's throats; then people at Beyrout or elsewhere sit down and write letters. The one says, Sheik Nasif is a monster; and the other says, Sheik Nasif is a very fine man. One says, the Maronites are a very virtuous and oppressed people of Christians; another says, they are served right, for they are only Roman Catholics. One says, the Druzes have done it all; they are savages: another, the Turks have done it all; they are ferocious, perfidious and fanatic. Then the people in London begin to write, who dwell in rooms on the housetop. They say, these people are very ill off; we must protect them; or, we must punish them; or, we must convert them. Then they all cry out, We must put down the Turkish Government. The

persons who write this are paid for it; and after it has been written and paid for, it is printed; and after it is printed, it is sold. Then all the nation buys it, and after it has bought it, it reads it while it is eating its breakfast. Then each man goes out and meets his friends and talks it. This is the way the people of England occupy themselves about their affairs; and they call it by a name which being translated means "UNIVERSAL GUESS." They smile then at each other, and say, "We are great men, we know all that is doing in the world, we govern the world; like unto us were none such since Noah came out of the Ark ;" and they are quite right. Now you know more about England than if you had lived in it all your life.

"Still there are your line-of-battle ships; these are your ambassadors. You are strong."

The house that is bankrupt at 12 o'clock, is wealthy in the morning. Ships and guns, wealth and regiments, legs and arms, go to constitute strength, but do not alone make it. You must have besides, either the brain to do wrong profitably, or the heart to abstain from doing it at all. Without these, ships and guns are as a knife to a child, or a hatchet to a maniac; first, it will destroy the life of others, and then it will take its own.

"Then there may be worse places than the Lebanon."

Certainly, both in prospects for the future, and possession for the present. There is no man amongst

you who, knowing both, would change his station here for the relative one amongst us.

He now left me to get some rest; but, however exhausted, despite the Spanish proverb, I still feared the fleas, and with some bedding well beaten, laid down on the roof, I soon fell asleep. But presently I became dreamily aware of the presence of that magic-like dawn, to which I had been for nearly three months a stranger. Through my half-opened lids, with my half-awakened sense, between the coverlids and the terraced roof, I beheld the " Bird of Abaye" (the opposite hill), go through its cameleon changes; not as if the tinted light fell upon it, but as if varying colours were circulating within, until the sun rudely disturbing their gentle gambols, I drew my cloak over my head and sought, not in vain, another hour of rest for my aching bones.

CHAPTER XVI.

ANTIQUITY OF THE SOURIANS.

April 1st.-THE Sheik promised to send me by a short cut, and kept his word. I reached Beyrout, descending to the coast by the Damour, in little more than four hours. It was the worst road I ever traversed: there remained fragments of a stair cut in the rock, six feet wide; the steps low, and about three feet deep. It can be but rarely that animals ascend and descend it, yet the steps were worked into holes by their hoofs. How my horses reached the bottom I do not know, as I had preceded them, and is only to be explained on the principle that Syrian horses are infallible.

After reaching the bed of the Damour, we kept crossing and recrossing it, as if determined not to leave one fordable part untried, though indeed we attempted more than one that was not so. So soon as we got our legs out of the water, we had to duck and dip to save our heads from the boughs of the mulberries, (here of larger growth, and truncated in their branches, not their stems; looking like a forest of antlers) and lemons, which in orchards or gardens, cover its banks, and where, in pathless luxuriance, we had to wander in a labyrinth of sweet

smelling and blossoming trees. Whilst scrambling over the rocks to the Damour, a conversation was being carried on across the valley between two persons, who could not have met under two hours' hard walking. They have a manner of coiling up their voice, sailor-fashion, before casting it. They hold on to the note they have sped, until it is caught on the other side. Thus they begin-Eh! Tanou-ou-ou-ou-s-s-s-s (Tanous), and so word by word. In this way the war-cry is sent from village to village, and rock to rock, over the whole country in a few hours, and brings them with a celerity truly miraculous to those not in the secret. At Shimlan a murder was committed, and in half an hour fifty horsemen were on the spot from villages four, five, and six hours distant. Volney mentions an instance of 15,000 men being assembled, equipped for service at Deir el Cammar in the morning, by a cry issued over night.

After emerging on the shore, we turned to the right, and soon came to Mallaca, a village on a height celebrated for its silk. It may be the metropolis of Malaga of Spain: the name of the river, (Damour) recalls the Amorites (Ti-Amori in Berber). Below it was pointed out to me a large tract of land recently bought by Emir Emin, for £1000. Further on, the rocky point of the mountain invades the low strip of level beach, and runs out to the coast. The face of it is covered all over with sarcophagi. This is the richest and most extensive