d to tell me this story: Once there was a
priest who did not know how to count. This was a great trial to him, as
the Greeks have so many fasts and feasts that it is necessary to count
all the time or get into trouble. They have a long fast called _Soum el
kebir_, and it is sometimes nearly sixty days long. One year the fast
commenced, and the priest had blundered so often that he went to the
bishop and asked him to teach him some way to count the days to the
Easter feast. The bishop told him it would be forty days, and gave him
forty kernels of "hummus," or peas, telling him to put them into his
pocket and throw one out every day, and when they were all gone, to
proclaim the feast! This was a happy plan for the poor priest, and he
went on faithfully throwing away one pea every day, until one day he
went to a neighboring village. In crossing the stream he fell from his
donkey into the mud, and his black robe was grievously soiled. The good
woman of the house where he slept, told him to take off his robe and she
would clean it in the night. So after he was asleep she arose and washed
it clean, but found to her sorrow that she had destroyed the peas in the
priest's pocket. Poor priest, said she, he has lost all his peas which
he had for lunch on the road! But I will make it up to him. So she went
to her earthen jar and took a big double handful of hummus and put them
into the priest's pocket, and said no more. He went on his way and threw
out a pea every morning for weeks and weeks. At length, some of his
fellaheen heard that the feast had begun in another village, and told
the Priest. Impossible, said he. My pocket is half full yet. Others came
and said, will you keep us fasting all the year? He only replied, look
into my pocket. Are you wiser than the Bishop? At length some one went
and told the Bishop that the priest was keeping his people fasting for
twenty days after the time. And then the story leaked out, and the poor
woman told how she had filled up the pocket, and the bishop saw that
there was no use in trying to teach the man to count.

See the reapers in the field, and the women gleaning after them, just
as Ruth did so many thousand years ago! On this side is a "lodge in a
garden of cucumbers."

Now we come down upon the sea-shore again, and on our right is the great
plain of Akkar, level as a floor, and covered with fields of Indian corn
and cotton. Flocks and herds and Arab camps of black tents are scattered