him.  While awaiting a reply at the door, some one informed him that his daughter was at the fountain.  Without waiting further for official aid, he ran to the fountain, took up his daughter, put her on his back, and ran for Beirut, a distance of about four miles, where he brought her to my house, and placed her in my room, with loud ejaculations of thanks to God.  “Neshkar Allah; El mejd lismoo.”  Thanks to God!  Glory to His name!  The mother soon followed, and the girl was sent as a day scholar to the Seminary.  They are now living in Baabda.  The mother, Zarify, united with the Evangelical Church of Beirut, July 21, 1872, giving the best evidence of a true spiritual experience.  The little girl is anxious to teach, and it was proposed to employ her as an assistant in the girls’ school in Baabda, but the tyrannical oppressions of the priesthood upon the family who had offered their house for the school, and the refusal of the Pasha of Lebanon to grant protection to the persecuted, have obliged the brethren there to postpone their request for a school for the present.

Alas for the poor women of Syria!  Even when they seek to obtain the consolations of the Gospel by learning to read the Word of life, they are surrounded by priests and Sheikhs who watch their chance to destroy the “Bread of Life!” In March, 1865, a Maronite woman called at the Press to buy a book of poems, to teach her boy to read.  “Why not buy a Testament?” asked the bookseller.  “I did buy an Engeel Mushekkel,” (a voweled Testament.) “Be careful of it then,” said Khalil, “for the edition is exhausted, and you cannot get another for months.”  “It is too late to be careful now, for the book has been burned.”  “Burned? by whom?” “By the Jesuits, who gathered a large pile and burned them.”  God grant that as Tyndale’s English New Testament, first printed in 1527 was only spread the more widely for the attempts of the Papal Bishop of London to burn it, so the Arabic Bible may receive a new impulse from the similarly inspired efforts of the Bishop’s successors!

CHAPTER IX.

LUCIYA SHEKKUR.

The work done for Christ and for Syrian girls in the families of Missionaries in Syria, may well compare with that done in the established institutions of learning.  Mrs. Whiting was not alone in the work of training native Arab girls in her own home.  The same work had been done by other Missionaries before her, and has been carried on with no little success by Mrs. Bird, Mrs. Calhoun and others, up to the present time.

It is an interesting sight to see the Thursday afternoon Women’s meeting in the house of Mrs. Calhoun in Abeih, and to know that a large part of that company of bright, intelligent and tidily dressed young native women, who listen so intently to the Bible lesson, and join so heartily in singing the sweet songs of Zion, were trained up either in her own family, or under her own especial influence.  By means of her own example in the training of her children, she has taught the women of Abeih, and through them multitudes of women in other villages, the true Christian modes of family government and discipline, and introduced to their notice and practice many of those little conveniences and habits in the training of children, whose influence will be felt for many generations.