As a child, she has before her only a few short years in which she has an opportunity to go to school and the effort to improve those few years is very often fruitless, because just as she shows any signs of budding womanhood (as early as at the age of ten years and not later than thirteen years) she must lay aside her books and "be hidden," as they say in Arabic; then it is considered improper and immodest for a girl to be seen in the streets. Her education stops just at the point when her mind is beginning to open up, and she is learning to love her books. Thrown back into the seclusion of the Harem she soon forgets all she has learned. Should she be energetic enough to try to keep up her lessons and try to get reading matter, she is met with the taunt, "Are you a scribe or a lawyer, that you should read and write every day?" The girls who have an opportunity of going to school at all are in the minority, but for those who do, as in Christian lands, there is a peculiar fascination and joy connected with the first day of school after a month or two of vacation. Girls, new pupils and old, come trooping into the schoolroom enthusiastic, eager, and bright, rejoicing with all the ardor of childhood that they are allowed to come back to their beloved school and that they are not yet old enough to be "hidden." But there is a strain of sadness in all this joy, for in their interchange of confidences and family bits of news it comes out that a certain Fatima and a certain Zeinab, their big sisters, are sitting at home very sad and even shedding bitter and rebellious tears because, poor things! they have been "hidden" and their schooldays are over. A day or two after our school began, the teachers and girls were all startled by a rustle of long garments sailing in at the door. On closer observation they soon saw that their visitor was none other than little Habeeba of last year, who during the summer had blossomed out into a woman by donning all the trappings of a Harem lady, and she was truly "hidden," for not a speck of her face showed except one bright eye. She could not stay away from her beloved school, she said, so had begged special permission to come and spend an hour with her friends.