And now the lights are out in the village, the shepherds are asleep by the side of their flocks, the tinkling bell from the fold falls faintly on the still night air, and the watch-dog bays drowsily from his kennel at the gate.  Good night, fair world; ’tis time to seek repose.  Let us first read and meditate upon that delightful chapter, the tenth of St. John, where our blessed Saviour appropriates all these characters of a good shepherd to himself.

“The Land and the Book.”

“Faduel Moghabghab,” said our guest, laughing as he leaned over the tea-table toward two little maids, vainly trying to beguile their willing and sweetly puckered lips into pronouncing his name.  “Faduel Moghabghab,” he repeated in syllables, pointing to the card he had passed to them.  “Accent the u and drop those g’s which your little throats cannot manage,” he went on kindly, while the merriment sparkled in his dark eyes, and his milk-white teeth, seen through his black moustache as he laughed, added beauty to his delicate and vivacious face.

He was a man of winsome mind, this Syrian guest of ours, and the spirituality of his culture was as marked as the refinement of his manners.  We shall long remember him for the tales told that evening of his home in Ainzehalta on the slope of the Syrian mountains, but longest of all for what he said out of the memories of his youth about a shepherd song.

“It was out of the shepherd life of my country,” he remarked, “that there came long ago that sweetest religious song ever written—­the Twenty-third Psalm.”

After the ripple of his merriment with the children had passed he turned to me with a face now serious and pensive, and said:  “Ah, so many things familiar to us are strange to you of America.”

“Yes,” I answered, “and no doubt because of this we often make mistakes which are more serious than mispronunciation of your modern names.”

He smiled pleasantly, then with earnestness said:  “So many things in the life of my people, the same now as in the days of old, have been woven into the words of the Bible and into the conceptions of religious ideas as expressed there; you of the Western world, not knowing these things as they are, often misunderstand what is written, or at least fail to get a correct impression from it.”

“Tell us about some of these,” I ventured, with a parental glance at two listening little faces.

After mentioning several instances, he went on:  “And there is the shepherd psalm:  I find that it is taken among you as having two parts, the first under the figure of shepherd life, the second turning to the figure of a banquet with the host and the guest.”

“Oh, we have talked about that,” said my lady of the teacups as she dangled the tea-ball with a connoisseur’s fondness, “and we have even said that we wished the wonderful little psalm could have been finished in the one figure of shepherd life.”