Do you see those boys playing by the stone wall?  They are catching scorpions.  They put a little wax on a stick and thrust it into the holes in the wall, and the scorpions run their claws into the wax when they are easily drawn out, and the boys like to play with them.  The sting of the scorpion is not deadly, but it is very painful, something like being stung by half a dozen hornets.

Here come a company of Greek priests, with the Greek bishop of Akkar.  The priests are all Syrians but the bishop is from Greece, and knows but little Arabic.  The priests are very ignorant, for they are generally chosen from among the lowest of the people.

When the former Greek Bishop died in Tripoli, in 1858, his dead body was dressed in cloth of gold, with a golden crown on his head, and then the corpse was set up in a chair in the midst of the Greek Church, with the face and hands uncovered so that all the people could see him.  The fingers were all black and bloated, but the men, women and children crowded up to kiss them.  When the body was taken from the city to Deir Keftin, three miles distant the Greek mountaineers came down in a rabble to get the blessing from the corpse.  And how do you think they got the blessing?  They attacked the bearers and knocked off pieces of the coffin, and then carried off the pall and tore it in pieces, fighting for it like hungry wolves.  A number of people were wounded.  After the burial they dug up the earth for some distance around the tomb, and carried it off to be used as medicine.  A little girl brought a piece of the bishop’s handkerchief to my house, hearing that some one was ill, saying that if we would burn it and drink the ashes in water, we would be instantly cured.

The Syrians have a good many stories about their priests, which they laugh about, and yet they obey them, no matter how ignorant they are.  Abu Selim in the Meena used to tell me this story:  Once there was a priest who did not know how to count.  This was a great trial to him, as the Greeks have so many fasts and feasts that it is necessary to count all the time or get into trouble.  They have a long fast called Soum el kebir, and it is sometimes nearly sixty days long.  One year the fast commenced, and the priest had blundered so often that he went to the bishop and asked him to teach him some way to count the days to the Easter feast.  The bishop told him it would be forty days, and gave him forty kernels of “hummus,” or peas, telling him to put them into his pocket and throw one out every day, and when they were all gone, to proclaim the feast!  This was a happy plan for the poor priest, and he went on faithfully throwing away one pea every day, until one day he went to a neighboring village.  In crossing the stream he fell from his donkey into the mud, and his black robe was grievously soiled.  The good woman of the house where he slept, told him to take off his robe and she would clean it in the night.  So after he was asleep she arose and washed