ection, and only a few years ago, the great
gates of Hums were frequently closed at midday to prevent the incursion
of these rough robbers of the desert. On the west of the city are
beautiful gardens and orchards of cherry, walnut, apricot, plum, apple,
peach, olive, pomegranate, fig and pear trees, and rich vineyards cover
the fields on the south. It is a clean and compact town of about 25,000
inhabitants, of whom 7000 are Greek Christians, 3000 Jacobites, and the
rest Mohammedans. The houses are built of sun-dried bricks and black
basaltic rock, and the streets are beautifully paved with small square
blocks of the same rock, giving it a neat and clean appearance. There
are few windows on the street; the houses are one story high, with
diminutive doors, not more than four feet high; and the low dull walls
stretching along the streets, give the city a dismal and monotonous
appearance. The reason of building the doors so _low_, is to prevent the
quartering of Turkish government horsemen on their families, as well as
to prevent the Bedawin Arabs from plundering them. On the southwest
corner of the city stands an ancient castle in ruins, built on an
artificial mound of earth of colossal size, which was once faced with
square blocks of black trap rock, but this facing has been all stripped
off to build the modern city.

The people are simple and country-like in dress and manners, and the
most of them have a cow-yard within the courts of their houses, thus
combining the pastoral with the citizen life. The majority of the Greeks
are silk-weavers and shoemakers, weaving girdles, scarfs and robes for
different parts of Syria and Egypt, and supplying the Bedawin and the
Nusairy villagers with coarse red-leather boots and shoes.

Hums early became the seat of a Christian Church, and in the reign of
Diocletian, its bishop, Silvanus, suffered martyrdom. In 636
A.D., it was captured by the Saracens, (or "Sherakiyeen,"
"Easterns," as the Arab Moslems were called,) and although occupied for
a time by the Crusaders, it has continued a Moslem city, under
Mohammedan rule. The Greek population have been oppressed and ground to
the very dust by their Moslem neighbors and rulers, and their women have
been driven for protection into a seclusion and degradation similar to
that of the Moslem hareems.

The Rev. D.M. Wilson, a missionary of the A.B.C.F.M., took up his
residence in Hums in October 1855, and remained until obliged to leave
by t