Now that the French railway system has at last extended its operations into northern Syria, the old cities of Homs and Hama will doubtless soon lose much of their naïveté and Oriental color and become filled with dragomans who speak a dozen languages and shopkeepers who have a dozen prices for the unwary tourist. Up to the present, however, the district has been little touched by Western civilization, and we saw there a picture of Syrian life and customs, and especially of unspoiled Syrian politeness, not to be found in more accessible cities. We traveled from the seaport of Tripoli to Homs in a big yellow diligence, drawn by two horses and three mules, and driven by a couple of unkempt brigands who, in the absence of a sufficiently long whip, urged on their steeds by throwing heavy stones taken from a well-filled bushel-basket which was kept under the seat. The Syrians ordinarily throw like girls, and with as good an aim; but these men, while the coach was rolling and creaking like a ship in a storm, could strike the left ear of the farthest mule without any danger either to its own skull or to the other animals. This ugly, noisy conveyance, which took us sixty miles in eleven hours, seemed quite out of place as a part of the Syrian landscape, and we noticed that it surprised the rest of the country as much as it had us. The camels were the most astonished. Along the road would be seen approaching a distant caravan, led by a white-bearded old man riding a ridiculously small donkey. Behind him, the long line of great animals walked and chewed in a slow rhythm, and looked out upon the world with a solemn gaze which made us flippant sons of a young republic feel like crawling away somewhere and hiding for a few thousand years until we had acquired a little mellowness. But our mules represented the spirit of modern progress; on a down grade, it was progress at the dizzying speed of ten miles an hour. Now, viewed from the front, a camel looks like an overgrown chicken, and when he is startled he acts just like a flustered fowl. So we had the interesting experience of frightening half to death thirty of these great, clumsy creatures, who scampered and scattered over the road in every direction except the right one, ran into one another and knocked off carefully balanced loads, and tied up the connecting ropes into intricate knots which would challenge the genius of an Alexander to untangle, while a dozen or so stalwart Arabs cursed us with a choice of vituperation not to be found in our more stolid West—cursed with a long, deep, comprehensive curse which included us and our fathers, the diligence’s father and mother and distant relatives, and laid special emphasis upon the awful destruction which was sure to overtake the religion of the off mule.