“In Mount Lebanon there exist certain customs, which had their origin in kindly feeling and sympathy, but have now passed beyond the limits of propriety, and lost their original meaning.  For example, when one falls sick, his relatives and friends at once begin to pour in upon him.  The whole population of the town will come crowding into the house, each one speaking to the sick a word of comfort and encouragement, and then sitting down in the sick room.  The poor invalid must respond to all these salutations, and even be expected to rise in bed and bow to his loving friends.  Then the whole company must speak a word to the family, to the wife and children, assuring them that the disease is but slight, and the sick man will speedily recover.  Then they crowd into the sick room (and such a crowd it is!) and the family and servants are kept running to supply them with cigars and narghilehs, by means of which they fill the room with a dense and suffocating smoke.  Meantime, they talk all at once and in a loud voice, and the air soon becomes impure and suffocating, and all these things as a matter of course injure the sick man, and he becomes worse.  Then the childish doctors of the town are summoned, and in they come with grave faces, and a great show of wisdom, and each one begins to recount the names of all the medicines he has heard of, and describes their effects in working miraculous cures.  Then they enter into ignorant disputes on learned subjects, and talk of the art of medicine of which they know nothing save what they have learned by hearsay.  One will insist that this medicine is the best, because his father used it with great benefit just before he died, and another will urge the claims of another medicine, of a directly opposite character, and opinions will clash, and all in the presence of the sick man, who thus becomes agitated and alarmed.  He takes first one medicine and then its opposite, and then he summons other doctors and consults his relatives.  Then all the old women of the neighborhood take him in hand and set at naught all that the doctors have advised, give him medicines of whose properties they are wholly ignorant, and thus they hasten the final departure of their friend on his long last journey.  And if he should die, the whole population of the town assembles at once at the house and the relatives, friends, and people from other villages come thronging in.  They fill the house with their screams and wails of mourning.  They recount the virtues of the departed with groans and shrieks, and lamentations in measured stanzas.  This all resembles the customs of the old Greeks and Romans who hired male and female mourners to do their weeping for them.  After this, they proceed at once to bear the corpse to the grave, without one thought as to proving whether there be yet life remaining or not, not leaving it even twelve hours, and never twenty-four hours.  It is well known that this custom is most brutal and perilous, for