Early the other morning, for instance, my native servant appeared in a state of no little excitement to tell me that there had been a row in the night in the village, from which my house is distant only a few hundred yards, and that a young man was being killed. This was modified a few minutes after by the arrival of some weeping females, who said that if the young man could not find a place of refuge somewhere he would be killed; and, as if to emphasize this statement, no great interval elapsed before, on going out into the kitchen, I found the young man in question clinging to the legs of the kitchen table as though they were the horns of the altar. He was a not very prepossessing-looking young man of two or three and twenty, and on my appearance he abandoned the legs of the table and rushed at my hand, which he seized and kissed effusively. It is astonishing how affectionate a man can become under the influence of panic. I told him to go back to the table-legs and hold on there, and consider himself perfectly safe. I felt I could say this with a feeling of proud satisfaction, for had I not the British government at my back, and is not the British government celebrated for the chivalrous promptitude with which it rushes to the rescue of those in bodily peril? Meantime I sent for the spiritual sheik of the village, as the secular one, who is the real supreme authority in such matters, happened to be absent. Now, so far as I have been able to ascertain, the whole village, consisting of some five hundred souls, is related to the two sheiks, for the population has gone on marrying and intermarrying till the relationships are unfathomable. The young man in question was the youngest of four brothers, and he had one sister who had married the spiritual sheik's son. His mother, after having this numerous family, had married the secular sheik, who had himself had two sons by a former wife and who has one daughter by his present one. You will observe that the affair was already becoming mixed, and a strong suspicion was gradually stealing over me that there was a woman at the bottom of it. Such, indeed, proved to be the case; in fact, there turned out to be two. Now it happened, and this is not peculiar to the domestic relations of the Druses, that the secular sheik's sons by his first wife were very jealous of the children of their stepmother, and hated that elderly lady herself with the cordial hatred not unknown to stepchildren. They had contrived so to embitter the family circle, that the secular sheik, partly for the sake of peace, and partly, as I afterwards discovered, for another reason, had banished her for two years past from the marital roof; indeed, it had often been a matter of surprise to me when calling on this sheik, or dining with him, that I was always waited on by his daughter and not by his wife.