fter
twisting the cord as tight as possible, he takes his rod and beats
Mahmoud on the soles of his feet, until the poor boy is almost black in
the face with screaming and pain. Then he serves Saleh in the same way.
This is the _bastinado_ of which you have heard and read. When the
Missionaries started common schools in Syria, the teachers used the
bastinado without their knowledge, though we never allow anything of the
kind. But the boys behave so badly and use such bad language to each
other, that the teacher's patience is often quite exhausted. I heard of
one school where the teacher invited a visitor to hear the boys recite,
and then offered to whip the school all around from the biggest boy to
the smallest, in order to show how well he governed the school! They do
not use the alphabet in the Moslem schools. The boys begin with the
Koran and learn the _words by sight_, without knowing the letters of
which they are composed.

Here come two young men to meet us. Fine lads they are too. One is named
Giurgius, and the other Leopold. When they were small boys, they once
amused me very much. Mr. Yanni, who drew up his flag on the birth of
Barbara, sent Giurgius his son, and Leopold his nephew to the school of
an old man named Hanna Tooma. This old man always slept in the
afternoon, and the boys did not study very well when he was asleep. I
was once at Yanni's house when the boys came home from school. They
were in high glee. One of them said to his father, our teacher slept all
the afternoon, and we appointed a committee of boys to fan him and keep
the flies off while the rest went down into the court to play, and when
he moved we all hushed up until he was sound asleep again. But when he
_did_ wake up, he took the big "Asa" and struck out right and left, and
gave every boy in the school a flogging. The father asked, but why did
he flog them all? Because he said he knew some of us had done wrong and
he was determined to hit the right one, so he flogged us all!

See the piles of fruit in the streets! Grapes and figs, watermelons and
pomegranates, peaches, pears, lemons and bananas. At other seasons of
the year you have oranges, _sweet lemons_, plums, and apricots. There is
fresh fruit on the trees here every week in the year. Now we are passing
a lemonade stand, where iced lemonade is sold for a cent a glass, cooled
with snow from the summit of Mount Lebanon 9000 feet high. Grapes are
about a cent a pound and figs the sam