The citizens enjoyed us fully as much as we did them. Everywhere we went we were followed by a train of a dozen or two, and when we stopped to look at anything the crowd threatened to interfere with traffic—not that this would have seemed a serious offense to the Oriental mind! They were so interested in our every movement that I could never get room to use my camera until my friend would walk a little way off with an intense expression on his face and draw the cortège after him. Yet these people were not in the least noisy or rude and—I almost hesitate to make such a startling statement about a Syrian city—I do not remember being once asked for _bakhsheesh_. The inhabitants of Hama bear the reputation of being very proud and fanatical; but we did not find them so. We stayed with a young physician, a recent graduate of the college at Beirut; and in the evening a number of his friends dropped in to see us. As our own supply of Arabic was not at that time equal to the demands of a long conversation, we essayed one or two gymnastic tricks, only to be immediately outdone by our Syrian acquaintances. Then the ice was broken, and we settled down to a long evening of rough games, which always ended in somebody having his hand slapped with a knotted handkerchief. These strangely garbed men with their brown, wrinkled faces, entered into it all with such a childlike enjoyment that we were soon laughing and shouting as we had not done since the Christmas days of boyhood; and the little brazier, with its bright bed of charcoal that sent fearsome shadows of turbaned heads and long mustachios dancing on the white walls overhead, seemed a natural substitute for the Yule log which that very night was burning in the home across the seas. As the Christians form a quite insignificant minority of the population of Hama, they receive a degree of consideration from their Moslem neighbors such as is not granted in cities where the two religions are more nearly balanced and where jealousy and hatred consequently lead to frequent reprisals. Our host, Dr. Taufik, told us that some of his warmest friends were young Moslems. He has a large practice among the harems of the city, and has performed heroic operations upon their inmates. One afternoon he guided us through a narrow, winding lane filled with evil-smelling garbage, to a rude door not over five feet high. This was the entrance to the finest house in Hama, the residence of one of the doctor’s Moslem patients. Indeed, Dr. Taufik told us, with perhaps more of civic pride than strict accuracy, that it was the most magnificent dwelling in all Syria. The great central hall was decorated in mosaics of colored marble and overlaid with gold-leaf in intricate patterns of sumptuous beauty. Yet, as is so often the case in the East, the only approach to this splendid residence was through filth and odors which would hardly have been tolerated in the worst slums of an American city.