To the traveler, bewildered by strange customs and by peculiar ways of doing familiar things, this seems indeed a “Left-hand Land.” The Syrian holds a loose sheet of paper in his palm and writes from right to left. Yet numbers are written, like ours, from left to right. In beckoning, the fingers are turned downward. To nod “No” the head is jerked upward, and added emphasis is sometimes given by a sharp cluck of the tongue. The carpenter draws his saw toward him on the cutting stroke. The oarsman likes to stand up and face the bow of his boat. When digging, one man holds the handle of the shovel while two others do most of the work by pulling it with ropes. Except in cities which have felt European influence, it is the men who wear skirts or flowing bloomers, and the women who wear trousers. Keys are put into the locks upside down. In entering a house, the hat is kept on the head, but the shoes are removed. Grown men greet one another in public with embraces and kisses. You see them walking along hand in hand, or smelling little nosegays. Yet these acts are not necessarily indicative of effeminacy. For all you know, these same fellows may occupy their leisure moments with highway robbery. The slightest difference of opinion gives rise to excited vituperation and offensive gesticulation; but a blow is seldom given. When a Syrian does smite, he employs no half-way measures: he smites to kill. I only once saw a blow struck in anger: then a club four inches thick was, without warning, brought down with full force upon the head of an unfortunate boatman. In this topsy-turvy land, parents take the name of their first-born son, and use it even in signing legal papers. The gate-keeper at the American College, for instance, was never called anything but Abu Mohammed, “the Father of Mohammed.” When a son is despaired of, the public humiliation is sometimes avoided by inventing one. It is quite possible that Abu Zeki or Abu Saïd has no children at all. The daughters of the family are often called after jewels or flowers or constellations; yet, except in Protestant families, the birth of a girl is not an occasion for rejoicing. One father insisted on christening an unwelcome girl baby Balash, which might be translated “Nothing doing!” Another parent, who already had six daughters, was so disgusted at the advent of a seventh that he named her Bikeffeh, “Enough!” A Maronite proverb says, “The threshold mourns forty days when a girl is born.” Nevertheless the lot of the Christian woman, even in communities where Christianity means hardly more than a political organization, is usually far better than that of her Moslem sisters.