ment alike of
diplomatic skill and administrative energy.

The rout of the Egyptians was fatal to the Emir Bescheer, and it seemed
also, for a time, to the Damascus branch of the family of Besso. But in
these days a great capitalist has deeper roots than a sovereign prince,
unless he is very legitimate. The Prince of the Mountain and his
sons were summoned from their luxurious and splendid Beteddeen to
Constantinople, where they have ever since remained prisoners. Young
Fakredeen, the moment he heard of the fall of Acre, rode out with his
falcon, as if for the pastime of a morning, and the moment he was out of
sight made for the desert, and never rested until he reached the tents
of the children of Rechab, where he placed himself under the protection
of the grandfather of Eva.

As for the merchant himself, having ships at his command, he contrived
to escape with his wife and his young daughter to Trieste, and he
remained in the Austrian dominions between three and four years.
At length the influence of Prince Metternich, animated by Sidonia,
propitiated the Porte. Adarfi Besso, after making his submission at
Stamboul, and satisfactorily explaining his conduct to Riza Pasha,
returned to his country, not substantially injured in fortune, though
the northern clime had robbed him of his Arabian wife; for his brothers,
who, as far as politics were concerned, had ever kept in the shade, had
managed affairs in the absence of the more prominent member of their
house, and, in truth, the family of Besso were too rich to be long under
a cloud. The Pasha of Damascus found his revenue fall very short without
their interference; and as for the Divan, the Bessoes could always find
a friend there if they chose. The awkwardness of the Syrian catastrophe
was, that it was so sudden and so unexpected that there was then no time
for those satisfactory explanations which afterwards took place between
Adam Besso and Riza.

Though the situation of Besso remained, therefore, unchanged after the
subsidence of the Syrian agitation, the same circumstance could not be
predicated of the position of his foster-child. Fakredeen possessed
all the qualities of the genuine Syrian character in excess; vain,
susceptible, endowed with a brilliant though frothy imagination, and a
love of action so unrestrained that restlessness deprived it of energy,
with so fine a taste that he was always capricious, and so ingenious
that he seemed ever inconsistent. His