hat their camels should not be defiled with
the unclean beast! The travellers were _very_ indignant at such a loss,
but thought it was too bad to injure the feelings of the devout Moslems,
and said no more. What was their horror and wrath to hear the next night
that the Bedawin were seen cooking and eating their hams at midnight,
when they thought no one would see them!

Do the Syrian people all smoke? Almost all of them. They speak of it as
"drinking a pipe, drinking a cigar," and you would think that they look
upon tobacco as being as necessary to them as water. Old and young men,
women and even children smoke, smoke while they work or rest, while at
home or journeying, and measure distances by their pipes. I was
travelling, and asked a man how far it was to the next village. He said
about two pipes of tobacco distant! I found it to be nearly an hour, or
three miles. The Orientals spend so much time in smoking, that some one
has said "the Moslems came into power with the Koran in one hand, and
the sword in the other, but will go out with the Koran in one hand and
the pipe in the other!"

Here we are on the sandy beach. What myriads of sea shells, and what
beautiful colors they have. And here are sponges without number, but
they are worthless. There on the sea are the little sloops of the sponge
fishers. They are there through the whole summer and the fishers dive
down into the sea where the water is from 100 to 200 feet deep, and walk
around on the bottom holding their breath, and when they can bear it no
longer pull the cord which is tied around the waist, and then their
companions draw them up. They do not live long, as it is very hard and
unnatural labor. Sometimes they are killed by sharks or other sea
monsters. One of them told me that he was once on the bottom, and just
about to pick up a beautiful white sponge, when he saw a great monster
with huge claws and arms and enormous eyes coming towards him, and he
barely escaped being devoured. At another time, the men in the boat felt
a sudden jerk on the rope and pulled in, when they found only the man's
head, arms and chest on it, the rest of his body having been devoured by
some great fish or sea animal. The sponges grow on rocks, pebbles or
shells, and some of them are of great value. It is difficult to get the
best ones here, as the company who hire the divers export all the good
ones to Europe.

PART V.

Word has come that there is cholera in Odessa