in Damascus in 1860, thousands of the Greek
and Greek Catholic families migrated to Beirut, and among them was a man
named Khalil Ferah, who escaped the fire and sword with his wife and
his little daughter Zahidy. I remember well how we were startled one
evening in 1862, by hearing a crier going through the streets, "child
lost! girl lost!" The next day he came around again, "child lost!" There
was great excitement about it. The poor father and mother went almost
frantic. Little Zahidy, who was then about six years old, was coming
home from school with other girls in the afternoon, and they said a man
came along with a sack on his back, and told Zahidy that her mother had
sent him to buy her some sugar plums and then take her home, and she
went away with him. It is supposed that he decoyed her away to some
by-road and then put her into the great sack, and carried her off to the
Arabs or the gypsies.

The poor father left no means untried to find her. He wrote to Damascus,
Alexandria, and Aleppo, describing the child and begged his friends
everywhere to watch for her, and send him word if they found her. There
was one mark on the child, which, he said, would be certain to
distinguish her. When she was a baby, and nursing at her mother's
breast, her mother upset a little cup of scalding hot coffee upon the
child's breast, which burned it to a blister, leaving a scar which could
not be removed. This sign the father described, and his friends aided
him in trying to find the little girl. They went to the encampments of
the gypsies and looked at all the children, but all in vain. The father
journeyed by land and by sea. Hearing of a little girl in Aleppo who
could not give an account of herself, he went there, but it was not his
child. Then he went to Damascus and Alexandria, and at length hearing
that a French Countess in Marseilles had a little Syrian orphan girl
whose parents were not known, he sent to Marseilles and examined the
girl, but she was _not his child_. Months and years passed on, but the
father never ceased to speak and think of that little lost girl. The
mother too was almost distracted.

At length light came. Nine years had passed away, and the Beirut people
had almost forgotten the story of the lost Damascene girl. Your uncle S.
and your Aunt A. were sitting in their house one day, in Tripoli, when
Tannoos, the boy, brought word that a man and woman from Beirut wished
to see them. They came in and introduc