ounding confession, which we
now give out. For the two young Syrians, who were smuggled out of
their country by the boatmen of Beirut, and who smuggled themselves
into the city of New York (we beg the critic's pardon; for, being
foreigners ourselves, we ought to be permitted to stretch this term,
smuggle, to cover an Arabic metaphor, or to smuggle into it a foreign
meaning), these two Syrians, we say, became, in their capacity of
merchants, smugglers of the most ingenious and most evasive type.

We now note the following, which pertains to their business. We learn
that they settled in the Syrian Quarter directly after clearing their
merchandise. And before they entered their cellar, we are assured,
they washed their hands of all intrigues and were shrived of their
sins by the Maronite priest of the Colony. For they were pious in
those days, and right Catholics. 'Tis further set down in the
_Histoire Intime_:

"We rented a cellar, as deep and dark and damp as could be found. And
our landlord was a Teague, nay, a kind-hearted old Irishman, who
helped us put up the shelves, and never called for the rent in the
dawn of the first day of the month. In the front part of this cellar
we had our shop; in the rear, our home. On the floor we laid our
mattresses, on the shelves, our goods. And never did we stop to think
who in this case was better off. The safety of our merchandise before
our own. But ten days after we had settled down, the water issued
forth from the floor and inundated our shop and home. It rose so high
that it destroyed half of our capital stock and almost all our
furniture. And yet, we continued to live in the cellar, because,
perhaps, every one of our compatriot-merchants did so. We were all
alike subject to these inundations in the winter season. I remember
when the water first rose in our store, Khalid was so hard set and in
such a pucker that he ran out capless and in his shirt sleeves to
discover in the next street the source of the flood. And one day, when
we were pumping out the water he asked me if I thought this was easier
than rolling our roofs in Baalbek. For truly, the paving-roller is
child's play to this pump. And a leaky roof is better than an
inundated cellar."

However, this is not the time for brooding. They have to pump ahead to
save what remained of their capital stock. But Khalid, nevertheless,
would brood and jabber. And what an inundation of ideas, and what
questions!

"Think you," h