Five years ago there was a girl in the school who was once very rude and self-willed, and very hard to control.  She had a poor bed-ridden brother who had been a cripple for years, and was a great care to the family.  They used to carry him out in the garden in fine weather and lay him on a seat under the trees, and sometimes his sister would come home from the school and read to him from the Bible, to which he listened with great delight.  Not long after this he died, and his sister was sent for to come home to the funeral.  On reaching home she found a large crowd of women assembled from all that quarter of the city, shrieking and wailing over his death, according to the Oriental custom.  When A. the little girl came in, one of the women from an aristocratic Greek family was talking in a loud voice and saying that it was wrong for any person to go from the house of mourning to another house before first going home, because one going from a house of mourning would carry an evil influence with her.  A. listened and then spoke out boldly before the seventy women, “How long will you hold on to these foolish superstitions?  Beirut is a place of light and civilization.  Where can you find any such teaching as this in the gospel?  It is time for us to give up such superstitions.”  The old woman asked, “Where did that girl learn these things?  Truly she is right.  These things are superstitions, but they will not die until we old women die.”  It required a great deal of courage in A. to speak out so boldly, when her own brother had died, but all felt that she spoke the truth, and no one rebuked her.

Near by the house of A. is another beautiful house surrounded by gardens, and ornamented in the most expensive manner.  A little girl from this family was attending the school in 1867.  Her name was Fereedy.  She was a boarder and the best behaved girl in the school.  One day during vacation, her mother came to Rufka and said, “What have you done to my little daughter Fereedy?  She came home last Saturday with her sister, and at once took the whole care of the little children, so that I had no trouble with them.  And when night came she put her little sisters to bed and prayed with them all, and then in the morning she prayed with them again.  I never saw such a child.  She is like a little angel.”  The mother is of the Greek sect, and the little girl was only twelve years old.

And here is a story about another of the superstitions of the fellaheen, and what a little girl taught the people about them.  This little girl named L. went with her father to spend the summer in a mountain village, where the people had a strange superstition about an oak tree.  One day she went out to walk and came to the great oak tree which stood alone on the mountain side.  You know that the Canaanites used to have idols under the green trees in ancient times.  When L. reached the tree, she found the ground covered with dead branches which had fallen