n apartment just above the one in which
one of several wives was living. Could English girls realize the misery
in store for them in marrying Mohammedan husbands, they would be
thankful for any warning. Even if the husband himself is kind, there are
many painful things to undergo from his women relatives. And worse than
all is the denying of Christ before men in the acceptance of Islam. One
of these English women living in Syria as the wife of a Mohammedan, had
her daughter married to an own cousin at the age of thirteen, another
was obliged to give her ten-year-old daughter in marriage. I asked this
last woman how she could do such a thing. "It is her father's will and I
could do nothing." But she ran away the next day, so the man divorced
her. This same daughter has been married and divorced twice since then,
and is now living at home, and is at the head of a Mohammedan school for
girls. Two other sisters have been divorced, and are at home, one with
her child.

In Beirut, among the better classes girls are not married as young as
they used to be, though occasionally you hear of instances, as in the
case of a woman who had eight daughters and married two of them, twins,
at the age of eight. She gained nothing by this cruel act as they were
soon divorced and sent home. One reason for child-marriages among
Mohammedans in Syria is the conscription which demands for the army
every young man of eighteen. The one who cannot afford to escape
conscription by paid substitutes or money may be exempt if he has a wife
dependent upon him. When he is sixteen or seventeen his family send off
to some distant town for a young girl who is a destitute orphan, and
this child is married to the youth,--she may be ten years old, or nine,
or even eight, and cases are known where a girl of seven has been
married to a boy of sixteen.

One can hardly wonder that many of these girls are divorced, for they
are simply untrained, naughty children, unable to grasp what the duties
of a wife are, or that it is necessary to please their husbands or
conciliate their mothers-in-law. Mohammedan women say that the happiness
of a child-wife and her status in the family depend almost entirely upon
her mother-in-law. It is a sad fact that these little brides--children
in years--are very often old in knowledge of evil. Most Mohammedan
children are brought up in an atmosphere of such talk that their natures
seem steeped in vulgarity from their cradles and no m