"Coming out, I thank Madame, and ask her about the grave of Renan's sister. She pauses amazed, blows her narghilah smoke in my face, surveys me from top to toe, and puts to me those same questions with which I was tormented by her servant. Indeed, I had answered ten of hers, before I got this answer to mine: 'The sister of whom, thou sayst? That Frenchman who came here in the sixties for antiquities? Yes; his sister died and was buried here, but no Christian remembers her for good. She must have been a bad one like her brother, who was an infidel, they say, and did not know or fear God.--What wouldst thou see there? Art like the idiot Franje (Europeans) who come here and carry away from around the grave some stones and dust? Go thou with him--(this to the servant) and show him the vault of the Toubeiyahs, where she was buried.' This, in a supercilious air, while she drew from the narghilah the smoke, which I could not relish. "We come to the cemetery near the church in the centre of the town. The vault where Henriette was laid, a plain, plastered square cell, is not far from an oak which in the morning envelopes it with its shadow; and directly across are palms, whose shades at sundown, make a vain effort to kiss its dust. No grass, no flowers around; but much of the dust of neglect. And of this I take up a handful, like 'the idiot Franje'; but instead of carrying it away, I press therein my lips and leave my planted kisses near the vault.--When the mothers and the sisters of these sacred hills, O Henriette, can see the flowers of these kisses in thy dust, when they can appreciate the sacred purity of thy spirit and devotion, what mothers then we shall have, and what sisters! "I pass through the village descending on the carriage road to Jbail, or Byblus. In these diggings the shrewd antiquary digs for those precious tear-bottles of my ancestors. And everywhere one turns are tombs in which the archæologist finds somewhat to noise abroad. His, indeed, is a scholarship which is essentially necrophagous. For consider, what would become of it, if a necropolis, for instance, did not yield somewhat of nourishment,--a limb, a torso, a palimpsest, or even an earthen lamp, a potsherd, or a coin? I rail not at these scholarly grave-diggers because I can not interest myself in their work; that were unwise and unfair. But truly, I abominate this business of 'cashing,' as it were, the ruins and remains, the ashes and dust, of our ancestors. Archæology for archæology's sake is pardonable; archæology for the sake of writing a book is intolerable; and archæology for lucre is abominable.