Knowing that I cannot introduce a more grateful topic, and anxious to stave off as long as possible the financial one, which I suspect is in the background, I ask the dignified group of narghile smokers by which I am surrounded to tell me something of their family history. About four hundred years ago, they say, their ancestors came from the Hedjaz, being a branch of the tribe of Beni Ab Arabs, whose home were the deserts near Mecca, and who were closely related to the family of Mohammed. It is this ancestral connection with the Prophet which has always given the family the great prestige and consideration which it has enjoyed. In those days they came into the country as conquerors, and, settling themselves in their present village, soon reduced the surrounding district to subjection, and continued to rule it, nominally subject to the Pacha of Acre, but really independently, until the invasion of Palestine by Ibrahim Pacha, when, after a sturdy resistance, they were overcome, and the grandfather of my host was executed and the greater part of their lands taken from them. From that time the fortunes of the family began to decline. On the restoration of the country to the sultan, by means of the intervention of England, they derived no benefit. The Turkish government took care not to re-establish an influence which in former times had proved so formidable, and, indeed, one of my hosts had spent two years in prison. Some say it was because he had manifested a spirit of too great independence, but others allege that it was for the more prosaic reason of an inability or refusal to pay his debts. At all events, when the money-lending question came up, not then, but on the occasion of a return visit which they afterwards paid me, I was assured by those who ought to know that my picturesque, hospitable, dignified, and aristocratic hosts were—well, I won't exactly repeat what it was said they were, but they were not just the kind of people that one would select to lend money to. This grieved me exceedingly, not because I wanted to lend them any, but because they were such gentlemen; in fact, I have been there since, and been very royally entertained in the old castle—where the guests' room is gorgeously furnished, for this part of the world—in order to make my peace for not lending them money; for it is considered an insult, after you have been a man's guest and he asks you to accommodate him financially, if you refuse—which is perplexing when he has no satisfactory security to offer. Now, I want to keep on good terms with this powerful and fascinating and somewhat scampish family without losing my money to them, and the problem I am engaged in solving is how to do it. I have a horrible suspicion that it will yet be solved rather to their satisfaction than to mine.