gets the speculation, pays the Pacha on the spot, and then sells out to smaller fry, who sell in turn to a piratical horde of still smaller fry.  These latter compel the peasant to bring his little trifle of grain to the village, at his own cost.  It must be weighed, the various taxes set apart, and the remainder returned to the producer.  But the collector delays this duty day after day, while the producer’s family are perishing for bread; at last the poor wretch, who can not but understand the game, says, “Take a quarter—­take half—­take two-thirds if you will, and let me go!” It is a most outrageous state of things.

These people are naturally good-hearted and intelligent, and with education and liberty, would be a happy and contented race.  They often appeal to the stranger to know if the great world will not some day come to their relief and save them.  The Sultan has been lavishing money like water in England and Paris, but his subjects are suffering for it now.

This fashion of camping out bewilders me.  We have boot-jacks and a bath-tub, now, and yet all the mysteries the pack-mules carry are not revealed.  What next?

CHAPTER XLIII.

We had a tedious ride of about five hours, in the sun, across the Valley of Lebanon.  It proved to be not quite so much of a garden as it had seemed from the hill-sides.  It was a desert, weed-grown waste, littered thickly with stones the size of a man’s fist.  Here and there the natives had scratched the ground and reared a sickly crop of grain, but for the most part the valley was given up to a handful of shepherds, whose flocks were doing what they honestly could to get a living, but the chances were against them.  We saw rude piles of stones standing near the roadside, at intervals, and recognized the custom of marking boundaries which obtained in Jacob’s time.  There were no walls, no fences, no hedges—­nothing to secure a man’s possessions but these random heaps of stones.  The Israelites held them sacred in the old patriarchal times, and these other Arabs, their lineal descendants, do so likewise.  An American, of ordinary intelligence, would soon widely extend his property, at an outlay of mere manual labor, performed at night, under so loose a system of fencing as this.

The plows these people use are simply a sharpened stick, such as Abraham plowed with, and they still winnow their wheat as he did—­they pile it on the house-top, and then toss it by shovel-fulls into the air until the wind has blown all the chaff away.  They never invent any thing, never learn any thing.

We had a fine race, of a mile, with an Arab perched on a camel.  Some of the horses were fast, and made very good time, but the camel scampered by them without any very great effort.  The yelling and shouting, and whipping and galloping, of all parties interested, made it an exhilarating, exciting, and particularly boisterous race.