The name of the journal is “koukab es Subah,” or “Morning Star.”  She has been confined to her bed a part of the summer, and when she gave me the manuscript, she apologized for the handwriting, on the ground that she had written the most of it sitting or lying on her bed.  She has not forgotten the example and instructions of Dr. and Mrs. De Forest, and speaks of them with enthusiastic interest.  Her husband failed in business some years ago, and she is in a constant struggle with want, but her old friends and loving sisters, Raheel and Lulu, who are among her nearest neighbors, are unremitting in their kind attentions to her.

What a difference between the faithful Christian nurture her little children are receiving at home, and the worse than no training received by the children of her Druze relatives at Ras Beirut, who are still under the shadow of their old superstitions.  She never curses her children nor invokes the wrath of God upon them.  She is never beaten and spit upon and tortured and threatened with death by her husband.  It is worth much to have rescued a Khozma and an Abla from the degradation of Druze superstition!  These two good women, with Abdullah in Beirut, and Hassan, Hassein, Asaad and Ali, in Lebanon, are among the living witnesses to the preciousness of the love of Christ, who have come forth from the Druze community.  They have been persecuted, and may be again, but they stand firm in Christ.  Not a few Druze girls are gathered in our schools in Beirut, Lebanon, and the vicinity of Hermon, as well as in other schools in Damascus, Hasbeiya and elsewhere, and some of their young men are receiving a Christian education.

CHAPTER IV.

NUSAIRIYEH.

To the North of Mount Lebanon, and along the low range of mountains extending from Antioch to Tripoli, and from the Mediterranean on the West to Hums on the East, live a strange, wild, blood-thirsty race called the Nusairiyeh numbering about 200,000 souls, and now for the first time in their history coming within the range of Missionary effort.

The Druzes admit women to the Akkal or initiated class, but not so the Nusairiyeh.  The great secret of the Sacrament is administered in a secluded place, the women being shut up in a house, or kept away from the mysteries.  In these assemblies the Sheikh reads prayers, and then all join in cursing Abubekr, Omar, Othman, Sheikh et-Turkoman and the Christians and others.  Then he gives a spoonful of wine, first to the Sheikhs present, and then to all the rest.  They then eat fruit, offer other prayers, and the assembly breaks up.  The rites of initiation are frightful in the extreme, attended by threats, imprecations and blasphemous oaths, declaring their lives forfeited if they expose the secrets of the order.