can tell their own shoes. So do I. And the boys often wear off
each other's shoes by mistake or on purpose, and then you will see Selim
running with one shoe on, and one of Ibrahim's in his hand, shouting and
cursing Ibrahim's father and grandfather, until he gets back his lost
property. Sometimes when men leave their shoes outside the door of a
house where they are calling, some one will steal them, and then they
are in a sorry plight. Shoes are regarded as very unclean, and when you
are talking in polite society, it will never do to speak of them,
without asking pardon. You would say, "the other day some one stole my
new shoes, ajellak Allah," _i.e._, May God exalt you above such a vile
subject! You would use the same words if you were talking with a Moslem,
and spoke of a dog, a hog, a donkey, a girl or a woman.

They do not think much of girls in Syria. The most of the people are
very sorry when a daughter is born. They think it is dreadful, and the
poor mother will cry as if her heart would break. And the neighbors come
in and tell her how sorry they are, and condole with her, just as if
they had come to a funeral. In Kesrawan, a district of Mount Lebanon
near Beirut, the Arab women have a proverb, "The threshold weeps forty
days when a girl is born."

There is a great change going on now in Syria in the feelings of the
people in regard to girls, but in the interior towns and villages where
the light of the Gospel has not shone as yet, and there are no schools,
they have the ancient ideas about them up to this very hour.

I knew an old Syrian grandmother in Tripoli who would not kiss her
granddaughter for six months after she was born, because she was born a
girl! But I know another family in that city of Tripoli that do not
treat girls in that style. The father is Mr. Antonius Yanni, a good
Christian man, and a member of the Mission Church. He is American Vice
Consul, and on the top of his house is a tall flag-staff, on which
floats the stars and stripes, on Fourth of July, and the Sultan's
birthday, Queen Victoria's birthday, and other great feast days. One day
when the Tripoli women heard that "Sitt Karimeh, Yanni's wife, had
another "_bint_," (girl) they came in crowds to comfort her in her great
affliction! When Yanni heard of it, he could not restrain himself. He
loved his older daughter Theodora very dearly, and was thankful to God
for another sweet baby girl, so he told the women that he would have
none