bright red caps and shoes, and some of them with white turbans.  They come out on feast days and holidays to play on this green lawn and feed the fish.  The old sheikh who keeps this holy place, has great faith in these fish.  He says they are all good Moslems, and are inhabited by the souls of Moslem saints, and there is one black fish, the Sheikh of the saints, who does not often show himself to spectators.  There are hundreds if not thousands of fish, resembling the dace or chubs of America.  He says that during the Crimean war, many of the older ones went off under the sea to Sevastopol and fought the Russian infidels, and some of them came back wounded.  The people think that if any one eats these fish he will die immediately.  That I know to be false, for I have tried it.  When the American Consul was here in 1856, his Moslem Kawasses caught several of the fish, and brought them to Mr. Lyons’ house.  We had them cooked and ate them, but found them coarse and unpalatable.  That was sixteen years ago and we have not felt the evil effects yet.

This poor woman has a sick child, and has come to get the Sheikh to read the Koran over it and cure it.  The most of the Syrian doctors are ignorant quacks, and the people have so many superstitions that they prefer going to saints’ tombs rather than call a good physician.  There is a Medical College in Beirut now, and before long Syria will have some skilful doctors.  I knew an old Egyptian doctor in Duma named Haj Ibrahim, who was a conceited fellow.  He used to bleed for every kind of disease.  An old man eighty years of age was dying of consumption, and the Haj opened a vein and let him bleed to death.  When the man died, he said if he had only taken a little more blood, the old man would have recovered.  I was surprised by his coming to me one day and asking for some American newspapers.  I supposed he wished them to wrap medicines in and gave him several New York Tribunes.  A few days after he invited us to eat figs and grapes in his vineyard and we stopped at his house.  He said he was very thankful for the papers.  They had been very useful.  I wondered what he meant, and asked him.  He showed me a jar in the corner in which he had dissolved the papers into a pulp in oil and water, and had given the pulp as medicine to the people!  He said it was a powerful medicine.  He supposed that the English printed letters would have some magic influence on diseases.

One of the Moslem lads carries a short iron spear as a sign that he is going to be a derwish.  Dr. De Forest once found himself surrounded in a Moslem village by a troop of little Moslems, each of them with an iron-headed spear in his hand.  A Moorish Sheikh, or Chief, had been for some two years teaching the Moslems of the place the customs of their holy devotees, and in consequence all the boys had become derwishes, or Moslem monks.  He was a shrewd old Sheikh.  He knew that the true way to perpetuate his religion was to teach the children.