See the piles of fruit in the streets!  Grapes and figs, watermelons and pomegranates, peaches, pears, lemons and bananas.  At other seasons of the year you have oranges, sweet lemons, plums, and apricots.  There is fresh fruit on the trees here every week in the year.  Now we are passing a lemonade stand, where iced lemonade is sold for a cent a glass, cooled with snow from the summit of Mount Lebanon 9000 feet high.  Grapes are about a cent a pound and figs the same, and in March you can buy five oranges or ten sweet lemons for a cent.  Huge watermelons are about eight or ten cents a piece.  We buy so many pounds of milk and oil and potatoes and charcoal.  The prickly pear, or subire, is a delicious fruit, although covered with sharp barbed spines and thorns.  It is full of hard large woody seeds, but the people are very fond of the fruit.  Sheikh Nasif el Yazijy was a famous Arab poet and scholar, and a young man once brought him a poem to be corrected.  He told him to call in a few days and get it.  He came again and the Sheikh said to him.  “Your poem is like the Missionary’s prickly pear!” “The Missionary’s prickly pear?” said the young poet.  “What do you mean?” “Why,” said the Sheikh, “Dr. ——­ a missionary, when he first came to Syria, had a dish of prickly pears set before him to eat.  Not liking to eat the seeds, he began to pick them out, and when he had picked out all the seeds, there was nothing left!  So your poem.  You asked me to remove the errors, and I found that when I had taken out all the errors, there was nothing left.”

It is about time for us to start.  We will ride through the orange gardens and see the rich fruit bending the trees almost down to the ground.  Steer your way carefully through the crowd of mules, pack horses, camels and asses loaded with boxes of fruit hastening down to the Meena for the steamer which goes North to-night.

Here is Yanni, with his happy smiling face coming out to meet us.  We will dismount and greet him.  He will kiss us on both cheeks and insist on our calling at his house.  The children are glad to see you, and the Sitt Karimeh asks, how are “the preserved of God?” that is, the children.  Then the little tots come up to kiss my hand, and Im Antonius, the old grandmother, comes and greets us most kindly.  It was not always so.  She was once very hostile to the Missionaries.  She thought that her son had done a dreadful deed when he became a Protestant.  Although she once loved him, she hated him and hated us.  She used to fast, and make vows, and pray to the Virgin and the saints, and beat her breast in agony over her son.  She had a brother and another son, who were like her, and they all persecuted Yanni.  But he bore it patiently without an unkind word in return for all their abuse.  At length the brother Ishoc was taken ill.  Im Antonius brought the pictures and put them over his head and called the priests.  He said, “Mother, take away these idols.