fectly free from all disagreeable antecedents, was not to
be treated lightly. All the leaders of all the parties of the mountain
frequented the castle of Fakredeen, and each secretly believed that the
prince was his pupil and his tool. There was not one of these men,
grey though some of them were in years and craft, whom the innocent and
ingenuous Fakredeen did not bend as a nose of wax, and, when Adam Besso
returned to Syria in '43, he found his foster-child by far the most
considerable person in the country, and all parties amid their doubts
and distractions looking up to him with hope and confidence. He was then
nineteen years of age, and Eva was sixteen. Fakredeen came instantly
to Damascus to welcome them, hugged Besso, wept like a child over his
sister, sat up the whole night on the terrace of their house smoking
his nargileh, and telling them all his secrets without the slightest
reserve: the most shameful actions of his career as well as the most
brilliant; and finally proposed to Besso to raise a loan for the
Lebanon, ostensibly to promote the cultivation of mulberries, really to
supply arms to the discontented population who were to make Fakredeen
and Eva sovereigns of the mountain. It will have been observed, that to
supply the partially disarmed tribes of the mountain with weapons was
still, though at intervals, the great project of Fakredeen, and to
obtain the result in his present destitution of resources involved
him in endless stratagems. His success would at the same time bind the
tribes, already well affected to him, with unalterable devotion to a
chief capable of such an undeniable act of sovereignty, and of course
render them proportionately more efficient instruments in accomplishing
his purpose. It was the interest of Fakredeen that the Lebanon should be
powerful and disturbed.

Besso, who had often befriended him, and who had frequently rescued
him from the usurers of Beiroot and Sidon, lent a cold ear to these
suggestions. The great merchant was not inclined again to embark in
a political career, or pass another three or four years away from his
Syrian palaces and gardens. He had seen the most powerful head that the
East had produced for a century, backed by vast means, and after having
apparently accomplished his purpose, ultimately recoil before the
superstitious fears of Christendom, lest any change in Syria should
precipitate the solution of the great Eastern problem. He could not
believe tha