What is the matter with those boys in that dark room?  Are they on rockers?  They keep swinging back and forth and screaming at the top of their voices all at once, and an old blind man sits on one side holding a long stick.  They all sit on the floor and hold books or tin cards in their hands.  This is a Moslem school, and the boys are learning to read and write.  They all study aloud, and the old blind Sheikh knows their voices so well that when one stops studying, he perceives it, and reaches his long stick over that way until the boy begins again.  When a boy comes up to him to recite, he has to shout louder than the rest, so that the Sheikh can distinguish his voice.  There, two boys are fighting.  The Sheikh cannot and will not have fighting in his school, and he calls them up to him.  They begin to scream and kick and call for their mothers, but it is of no use.  Sheikh Mohammed will have order.  Lie down there you Mahmoud!  Mahmoud lies down, and the Sheikh takes a stick like a bow with a cord to it, and winds the cord around his ankles.  After twisting the cord as tight as possible, he takes his rod and beats Mahmoud on the soles of his feet, until the poor boy is almost black in the face with screaming and pain.  Then he serves Saleh in the same way.  This is the bastinado of which you have heard and read.  When the Missionaries started common schools in Syria, the teachers used the bastinado without their knowledge, though we never allow anything of the kind.  But the boys behave so badly and use such bad language to each other, that the teacher’s patience is often quite exhausted.  I heard of one school where the teacher invited a visitor to hear the boys recite, and then offered to whip the school all around from the biggest boy to the smallest, in order to show how well he governed the school!  They do not use the alphabet in the Moslem schools.  The boys begin with the Koran and learn the words by sight, without knowing the letters of which they are composed.

Here come two young men to meet us.  Fine lads they are too.  One is named Giurgius, and the other Leopold.  When they were small boys, they once amused me very much.  Mr. Yanni, who drew up his flag on the birth of Barbara, sent Giurgius his son, and Leopold his nephew to the school of an old man named Hanna Tooma.  This old man always slept in the afternoon, and the boys did not study very well when he was asleep.  I was once at Yanni’s house when the boys came home from school.  They were in high glee.  One of them said to his father, our teacher slept all the afternoon, and we appointed a committee of boys to fan him and keep the flies off while the rest went down into the court to play, and when he moved we all hushed up until he was sound asleep again.  But when he did wake up, he took the big “Asa” and struck out right and left, and gave every boy in the school a flogging.  The father asked, but why did he flog them all?  Because he said he knew some of us had done wrong and he was determined to hit the right one, so he flogged us all!