est, laughing as he leaned over the
tea-table toward two little maids, vainly trying to beguile their
willing and sweetly puckered lips into pronouncing his name.
"Faduel Moghabghab," he repeated in syllables, pointing to the card
he had passed to them. "Accent the u and drop those g's which your
little throats cannot manage," he went on kindly, while the
merriment sparkled in his dark eyes, and his milk-white teeth, seen
through his black moustache as he laughed, added beauty to his
delicate and vivacious face.

He was a man of winsome mind, this Syrian guest of ours, and the
spirituality of his culture was as marked as the refinement of his
manners. We shall long remember him for the tales told that
evening of his home in Ainzehalta on the slope of the Syrian
mountains, but longest of all for what he said out of the memories
of his youth about a shepherd song.

"It was out of the shepherd life of my country," he remarked, "that
there came long ago that sweetest religious song ever written--the
Twenty-third Psalm."

After the ripple of his merriment with the children had passed he
turned to me with a face now serious and pensive, and said: "Ah, so
many things familiar to us are strange to you of America."

"Yes," I answered, "and no doubt because of this we often make
mistakes which are more serious than mispronunciation of your
modern names."

He smiled pleasantly, then with earnestness said: "So many things
in the life of my people, the same now as in the days of old, have
been woven into the words of the Bible and into the conceptions of
religious ideas as expressed there; you of the Western world, not
knowing these things as they are, often misunderstand what is
written, or at least fail to get a correct impression from it."

"Tell us about some of these," I ventured, with a parental glance
at two listening little faces.

After mentioning several instances, he went on: "And there is the
shepherd psalm: I find that it is taken among you as having two
parts, the first under the figure of shepherd life, the second
turning to the figure of a banquet with the host and the guest."

"Oh, we have talked about that," said my lady of the teacups as she
dangled the tea-ball with a connoisseur's fondness, "and we have
even said that we wished the wonderful little psalm could have been
finished in the one figure of shepherd life."

"It seems to us," I added, wishing to give suitable support to my
lady's rather br