he House
of Shehaab by policy, he was devoted to Fakredeen as much by sympathy
as interest, and had contrived the secret mission of Archbishop Murad
to Europe, which had so much perplexed M. Guizot, Lord Cowley, and Lord
Aberdeen; and which finally, by the intervention of the same Bishop
Nicodemus, Fakredeen had disowned.

Came caracoling up the winding steep of Canobia a troop of horsemen,
showily attired, and riding steeds that danced in the sunny air. These
were the princes Kais and Abdullah Shehaab, and Francis El Kazin, whom
the Levantines called Caseno, and the principal members of the Young
Syria party; some of them beardless Sheikhs, but all choicely mounted,
and each holding on his wrist a falcon; for this was the first day of
the year that they might fly. But those who cared not to seek a quarry
in the partridge or the gazelle, might find the wild boar or track the
panther in the spacious woods of Canobia.

And the Druse chief of the House of Djezbek, who for five hundred years
had never yielded precedence to the House of Djinblat, and Sheikh Fahour
Kange, who since the civil war had never smoked a pipe with a Maronite,
but who now gave the salaam of peace to the crowds of Habeishs and
Dahdahes who passed by; and Butros Keramy, the nephew of the patriarch,
himself a great Sheikh, who inhaled his nargileh as he rode, and who
looked to the skies and puffed forth his smoke whenever he met a son
of Eblis; and the House of Talhook, and the House of Abdel-Malek and
a swarm of Elvasuds, and Elheires, and El Dahers, Emirs and Sheikhs on
their bounding steeds, and musketeers on foot, with their light jackets
and bare legs and wooden sandals, and black slaves, carrying vases and
tubes; everywhere a brilliant and animated multitude, and all mounting
the winding steep of Canobia.

The great court of the castle was crowded with men and horses, and fifty
mouths at once were drinking at the central basin; the arcades were full
of Sheikhs, smoking and squatted on their carpets, which in general they
had spread in this locality in preference to the more formal saloons,
whose splendid divans rather embarrassed them; though even these
chambers were well attended, the guests principally seated on the marble
floors covered with their small bright carpets. The domain immediately
around the castle was also crowded with human beings. The moment anyone
arrived, his steed was stabled or picketed; his attendants spread his
carpet, so