After the terrible massacre in Damascus in 1860, thousands of the Greek and Greek Catholic families migrated to Beirut, and among them was a man named Khalil Ferah, who escaped the fire and sword with his wife and his little daughter Zahidy.  I remember well how we were startled one evening in 1862, by hearing a crier going through the streets, “child lost! girl lost!” The next day he came around again, “child lost!” There was great excitement about it.  The poor father and mother went almost frantic.  Little Zahidy, who was then about six years old, was coming home from school with other girls in the afternoon, and they said a man came along with a sack on his back, and told Zahidy that her mother had sent him to buy her some sugar plums and then take her home, and she went away with him.  It is supposed that he decoyed her away to some by-road and then put her into the great sack, and carried her off to the Arabs or the gypsies.

The poor father left no means untried to find her.  He wrote to Damascus, Alexandria, and Aleppo, describing the child and begged his friends everywhere to watch for her, and send him word if they found her.  There was one mark on the child, which, he said, would be certain to distinguish her.  When she was a baby, and nursing at her mother’s breast, her mother upset a little cup of scalding hot coffee upon the child’s breast, which burned it to a blister, leaving a scar which could not be removed.  This sign the father described, and his friends aided him in trying to find the little girl.  They went to the encampments of the gypsies and looked at all the children, but all in vain.  The father journeyed by land and by sea.  Hearing of a little girl in Aleppo who could not give an account of herself, he went there, but it was not his child.  Then he went to Damascus and Alexandria, and at length hearing that a French Countess in Marseilles had a little Syrian orphan girl whose parents were not known, he sent to Marseilles and examined the girl, but she was not his child.  Months and years passed on, but the father never ceased to speak and think of that little lost girl.  The mother too was almost distracted.

At length light came.  Nine years had passed away, and the Beirut people had almost forgotten the story of the lost Damascene girl.  Your uncle S. and your Aunt A. were sitting in their house one day, in Tripoli, when Tannoos, the boy, brought word that a man and woman from Beirut wished to see them.  They came in and introduced themselves.  They were Khalil, the father of the little lost girl, and his sister, who had heard that Zahidy was in Tripoli, and had come to search for her.  The mother was not able to leave home.