In the coppersmiths' bazaar there is an incessant clattering of little hammers upon hollow metal. The goldsmiths sit silent in their pens within a vast, dim building, or bend over their miniature furnaces making gold and silver filigree. Here are the carpenters using their bare feet in their work almost as deftly as their fingers; and yonder the dyers festooning their long strips of blue cotton from their windows and balconies. Down there, on the way to the Great Mosque, the booksellers hold together: a dwindling tribe, apparently, for of the thirty or forty shops which were formerly theirs not more than half a dozen remain true to literature: the rest are full of red and yellow slippers. Damascus is more inclined to loafing or to dancing than to reading. It seems to belong to the gay, smiling, easy-going East of Scheherazade and Aladdin, not to the sombre and reserved Orient of fierce mystics and fanatical fatalists. Yet we feel, or imagine that we feel, the hidden presence of passions and possibilities that belong to the tragic side of life underneath this laughing mask of comedy. No longer ago than 1860, in the great Massacre, five thousand Christians perished by fire and shot and dagger in two days; the streets ran with blood; the churches were piled with corpses; hundreds of Christian women were dragged away to Moslem harems; only the brave Abd-el-Kader, with his body-guard of dauntless Algerine veterans, was able to stay the butchery by flinging himself between the blood-drunken mob and their helpless victims. This was the last wholesale assassination of modern times that a great city has seen, and prosperous, pleasure-loving, insouciant Damascus seems to have quite forgotten it. Yet there are still enough wild Kurdish shepherds, and fierce Bedouins of the desert, and riffraff of camel-drivers and herdsmen and sturdy beggars and homeless men, among her three hundred thousand people to make dangerous material if the tiger-madness should break loose again. A gay city is not always a safe city. The Lady and I saw a man stabbed to death at noon, not fifty feet away from us, in a street beside the Ottoman Bank. Nothing is safe until justice and benevolence and tolerance and mutual respect are diffused in the hearts of men. How far this inward change has gone in Damascus no one can tell. But that some advance has been made, by real reforms in the Turkish government, by the spread of intelligence and the enlightenment of self-interest, by the sense of next-doorness to Paris and Berlin and London, which telegraphs, railways, and steamships have produced, above all by the useful work of missionary hospitals and schools, and by the humanizing process which has been going on inside of all the creeds, no careful observer can doubt. I fear that men will still continue to kill each other, for various causes, privately and publicly. But thank God it is not likely to be done often, if ever again, in the name of Religion!