"Leprosy has almost entirely disappeared from Europe; it is seen occasionally in Scandinavia and Italy, and a few cases have been reported in Spain. It exists in the East, but is not so prevalent as it was a thousand years ago, and once in a while you will hear of a leper in America and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. Doctor Bronson says he was once invited by Professor Pardee, Dean of the Medical College of New York, to see a case of leprosy from one of the mountain counties of Virginia. The patient was a negro, and, as far as the doctors could ascertain, he was suffering from leprosy of the same type as we find to-day in Damascus. [Illustration: PORTRAIT OF ABD-EL-KADR.] "We passed the house of Abd-el-Kader, the Arab chief who fought the French in Algeria for a long time, but was finally conquered, and required to choose some place not in Africa for his residence. He selected Damascus, and has lived here ever since, with the exception of an occasional visit to Paris, where he is always treated with a great deal of respect. At the time of the massacre in 1860 he sheltered a great many Christians in his house, and did everything in his power to stop the bloodshed. When the war broke out between France and Germany he offered his military services to the country that had conquered him, but the government did not think it good policy to accept them. "The bazaars of Damascus are so much like those of Cairo that it is unnecessary to describe them, as the picture of one will be almost identically that of the other. The mode of bargaining is the same; and if there is any difference at all in testing a stranger's patience it is in favor of Damascus. "One of our party wanted to buy some of the silk handkerchiefs for which Syria is famous, and we stopped in the silk bazaar for that purpose. The merchant asked twenty francs, and the buyer offered six; after chaffering for a full hour they met at twelve francs, and the transaction was closed. "The merchant then unrolled a piece of silk, which he assured us was of native manufacture. While he was praising it, and declaring he was offering it for half its value, he unrolled a little farther, when out dropped from the end of the roll a ticket with the name of a French manufacturer at Lyons! "He took it in as hastily as he could, but was not quick enough to prevent our seeing and reading it. This confirmed what we had heard before, that a great deal of the silk sold in Constantinople, Cairo, Beyroot, Damascus, and other Oriental places as native manufacture, is made in Europe in imitation of the genuine article. The counterfeit is so well executed that it cannot be distinguished from the genuine except by an expert, and frequently the only difference is in favor of the finish of the European goods.