Did I say that Dr. Bliss is old? Not he! He would indignantly deny the imputation. It is true that he celebrated his ninetieth birthday last August, but what of that? He recently expressed an intention to live to be a hundred. When he was a stalwart youth of four score I heard him remark, “Let the aged people talk about the good old times if they want to. I have no patience with such old fogies. _I_ believe that the world is getting better every day.” * * * * * Ras Baalbek is a little village some twenty miles north of the famous temples. Its thousand inhabitants are exceedingly ignorant and bigoted Oriental Catholics. The only native Protestant family is that of the school-teacher. There is also one American citizen—an adopted brother of ours who accumulated a few hundred dollars in the United States, learned a few words of English, and then returned to his birthplace, where he keeps the village khan, which has an evil reputation as a gambling-house. The Ras is cold in winter, hot in summer, and filthy at all seasons. The houses are built half of mud and half of stone; the streets are filled with unmitigated mud. A legion of fierce curs fill the night with their howling, and rush out of dark corners to snap at unsuspecting strangers. It was not an inviting town, but we had heard that two American ladies were spending the winter there in missionary work; so, after we had turned over our horses to our fellow citizen of the khan and had dug passably clean collars out of our dusty saddle-bags, we went to pay them an evening call. Their house was not hard to find, for it was the finest in all the village, a commodious mansion with two rooms, one built of stone and the other of mud. When the door opened for us, we passed immediately from Syria to America and, under the influence of the warmth and refinement and hospitable cheer of the mud-walled room, our sentiments toward Ras Baalbek underwent a complete and permanent change. These quiet-speaking, refined ladies did not look at all like martyrs of the faith. It was hard to realize that they had immured themselves in the midst of a dirty, ignorant, fanatical community, and were living in circumstances of very real hardship and peril. In the street just outside, the dogs were yelping noisily. From a neighboring roof a stentorian voice called out what corresponded to the evening edition of a local newspaper. The village was informed that the robber-tribe of Beit Dendish was ravaging the valley, a prominent resident had been murdered the preceding night, and Abu somebody-or-other had lost one of his goats. In the bright, warm room, however, we talked of American friends and American books, and discussed the probable outcome of the Yale-Princeton game.