It is very curious to go to the Syrian school-houses, and see the piles of shoes at the door.  There are new bright red shoes, and old tattered shoes, and kob kobs, and black shoes, and sometimes yellow shoes.  The kob kobs are wooden clogs made to raise the feet out of the mud and water, having a little strap over the toe to keep it on the foot.  You will often see little boys and girls running down steps and paved streets on these dangerous kob kobs.  Sometimes they slip and then down they go on their noses, and the kob kobs fly off and go rattling over the stones, and little Ali or Yusef, or whatever his name is, begins to shout, Ya Imme!  Ya Imme!  “Oh, my mother!” and cries just like little children in other countries.

But the funniest part of it is to see the boys when they come out of school and try to find their shoes.  There will be fifty boys, and of course a hundred shoes, all mixed together in one pile.  When school is out, the boys make a rush for the door.  Then comes the tug of war.  A dozen boys are standing and shuffling on the pile of shoes, looking down, kicking away the other shoes, running their toes into their own, stumbling over the kob kobs, and then making a dash to get out of the crowd.  Sometimes shins will be kicked, and hair pulled, and tarbooshes thrown off, and a great screaming and cursing follow, which will only cease when the Muallim comes with his “Asa” or stick, and quells the riot.  That pile of shoes will have to answer for a good many schoolboy fights and bruised noses and hard feelings in Syria.  You would wonder how they can tell their own shoes.  So do I. And the boys often wear off each other’s shoes by mistake or on purpose, and then you will see Selim running with one shoe on, and one of Ibrahim’s in his hand, shouting and cursing Ibrahim’s father and grandfather, until he gets back his lost property.  Sometimes when men leave their shoes outside the door of a house where they are calling, some one will steal them, and then they are in a sorry plight.  Shoes are regarded as very unclean, and when you are talking in polite society, it will never do to speak of them, without asking pardon.  You would say, “the other day some one stole my new shoes, ajellak Allah,” i.e., May God exalt you above such a vile subject!  You would use the same words if you were talking with a Moslem, and spoke of a dog, a hog, a donkey, a girl or a woman.

They do not think much of girls in Syria.  The most of the people are very sorry when a daughter is born.  They think it is dreadful, and the poor mother will cry as if her heart would break.  And the neighbors come in and tell her how sorry they are, and condole with her, just as if they had come to a funeral.  In Kesrawan, a district of Mount Lebanon near Beirut, the Arab women have a proverb, “The threshold weeps forty days when a girl is born.”

There is a great change going on now in Syria in the feelings of the people in regard to girls, but in the interior towns and villages where the light of the Gospel has not shone as yet, and there are no schools, they have the ancient ideas about them up to this very hour.