Sometimes children are named, and if after a few years they are sick, the parents change their names and give them new ones, thinking that the first name did not agree with them.  A Druze told me that he named his son in infancy Asaad (or happier) but he was sickly, so they changed his name to Ahmed (Praised) and after that he grew better!  He has now become a Christian, and has resumed his first name Asaad.

I once visited a man in the village of Brummana who had six daughters, whom he named Sun, Morning, Zephyr breeze, Jewelry, Agate, and Emerald.  I know girls named Star, Beauty, Sugar, One Eyed, and Christian Barbarian.  Some of the names are beautiful, as Leila, Zarifeh, Lulu, Selma, Luciya, Miriam and Fereedy.

All of the men are called Aboo-somebody; i.e. the father of somebody or something.  Old Sheikh Hassein, whose house I am living in, is called Aboo Abbas, i.e. the father of Abbas, because his eldest son’s name is Abbas.  A young lad in the village, who is just about entering the Freshman class in the Beirut College, has been for years called Aboo Habeeb, or the father of Habeeb, when he has no children at all.  Elias, the deacon of the church in Beirut was called Aboo Nasif for more than fifty years, and finally in his old age he married and had a son, whom he named Nasif, so that he got his name right after all.  They often give young men such names, and if they have no children they call them by the name of the son they might have had.  But they will not call a man Aboo Lulu or Aboo Leila.  If a man has a dozen daughters he will never be called from them.  They are “nothing but girls.”  A queer old man in Ghurzuz once tried to name himself from his daughter Seleemeh, but whenever any one called him Aboo Seleemeh, all the fellaheen would laugh as if they would explode, and the boys would shout at him “there goes old Aboo Seleemeh,” as if it were a grand joke.

The Moslems and Druzes generally give their children the old unmixed Arabic names, but the Maronites, the Greeks, and the Protestants often use European names.  A young lady named Miss Mason was once a teacher in the Sidon Seminary, and spent the summer in the mountain village of Deir Mimas.  One of the women of the village liked her name, and named her daughter “Miss Mason,” and if you should go there you would hear the little urchins of Deir Mimas shouting Miss Mason! to a little blue-gowned and tarbooshed Arab girl.

What noise is that we hear down in the village, under the great jowz (walnut) trees by the fountain?  It rolls and gurgles and growls and bellows enough to frighten a whole village full of children.  But the little Arab boys and girls are playing around, and the women are filling their jars at the fountain just as if nothing had happened.  But it is a frightful noise for all that.  It is the bellowing of the camels as their heavy loads are being put on.