When Paul was stricken with blindness on his way here (Acts 9:1-30), he was directed to enter the city, where he would be told all things that were appointed for him to do.  He obeyed the voice from heaven, and reached the house of Judas in Straight Street.  When I reached the traditional site of the house of Ananias, in the eastern part of the city, near the gate at the end of Straight Street, I found a good-natured woman sitting on the pavement just inside the door opening from the street to what would be called a yard in America.  The “house” has been converted into a small church, belonging to the Catholics, and it is entirely below the surface.  I went down the stairs, and found a small chamber with an arched ceiling and two altars.  I also went out and visited the old gateway at the end of the street.  The masonry is about thirteen feet thick, and it may be that here Paul, deprived of his sight, and earnestly desiring to do the will of the Lord, entered the city so long ago.  I then viewed a section of the wall from the outside.  The lower part is ancient, but the upper part is modern, and the portion that I saw was in a dilapidated condition.  “In Damascus,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “the governor, under Aretas the king, guarded the city of the Damascenes in order to take me:  and through a window was I let down in a basket by the wall, and escaped his hands” (2 Cor. 11:32,33).  In some places there are houses so built in connection with the wall that it would not be a very difficult thing to lower a man from one of the windows to the ground outside the city.

Mention has already been made of the Arab’s opinion of Damascus, and now I wish to tell how it appeared through my spectacles.  The view from the distance is very pleasing, but when one comes inside the wall and begins to walk about the streets, the scene changes.  The outside of the buildings is not beautiful.  The streets are narrow, crooked, and usually very dirty; in some cases they are filthy.  It seems that all kinds of rubbish are thrown into the streets, and the dogs are scavengers.  Perhaps no other city has so many dogs.  At one place up along the Abana, now called the Barada, I counted twenty-three of these animals, and a few steps brought me in sight of five more; but there is some filth that even Damascus dogs will not clean up.  Some of the streets are roughly paved with stone, but in the best business portion of the city that I saw there was no pavement and no sidewalk—­it was all street from one wall to the other.  I saw a man sprinkling one of the streets with water carried in the skin of some animal, perhaps a goat.  When I came out of the postoffice, a camel was lying on the pavement, and in another part of the city I saw a soldier riding his horse on the sidewalk.  Down in “the street which is called Straight” a full-grown man was going along as naked as when he was born.  Perhaps he was insane, but we do not even allow insane men to walk the streets that