In every good enterprise, in Tripoli, or in presbytery, Mr. Yusuf Faris is a leader, with clear advice and generous subscriptions. When the home mission work of the presbytery was organized, he was one of the leaders, and has continued to be the main support of the work. When the plans for the Tripoli Boys' School were under consideration and there was some danger that lack of money and other considerations might necessitate the removal of the school from Tripoli, Mr. Faris and his sons came forward with a generous offer of financial help, during a period of years aggregating nearly eighteen hundred dollars. This made him the third largest individual donor and we were glad to place his picture among those on the wall of the school reception room. In all the intercourse of these years, while watching the growth and development of character in this man, there has grown in my own heart a strength of personal attachment such as I have seldom felt for any other in America or in Syria. CHAPTER XIV TRIPOLI BOYS' SCHOOL The one enterprise which stands out most conspicuously in our life in Syria and which has absorbed more of our thought and activity than any other, is the boarding school for boys in Tripoli. In the earlier years of our work in Tripoli field, I found an important item to be the selection of promising candidates from the pupils in the village schools for further education in one of the mission boarding schools. We were anxious to encourage the higher education of boys, for in this respect as in many others, north Syria is more backward than other parts of the country. Means of communication were poor and it was not an easy thing for people to send their children to a distance of four or five days' travel. We used every means at our disposal to persuade reluctant parents, offering free tuition and sometimes traveling expenses and help with clothing. By all these means we could gather, from the whole territory, a dozen, or fifteen, or, at most, twenty boys, whose parents were willing to send them to school. [Illustration: TRIPOLI BOYS' SCHOOL _First Home_] [Illustration: TRIPOLI BOYS' SCHOOL _Second Home_] But emigration to America gradually opened the eyes of the people to the commercial advantages of education. Ignorant parents who had gone abroad began to send back money, with urgent instructions to put their boys in the American schools. We found the number of applicants increasing and a new willingness to pay, in part at least, for the education. Instead of a dozen, we had sixty or more to provide for and the tide was rising. Conditions were the same elsewhere and it was not easy for the other schools to receive this larger number from our district. Why, then, should our boys go so far from home?