"The palace is devoid of all beauty. It is new, but irregular; it has not two parts alike, and it has been built in pieces and bits, in accordance with fancy or necessity, in accordance with leisure or money. The emir has made a present to Lady Hester of a fine horse, richly caparisoned." But the English find it difficult to admire what is not their fief. Scarcely twenty years later, Lamartine was to find other expressions to proclaim aloud his admiration. The lack of symmetry! But it is that which ought to possess charm for lovers of the beautiful! And what a wonderful view was this medley of square towers pierced by ogives, of long galleries with files of arcades slender and light as the stems of pine-trees, of graceful colonnades of unequal shape rearing themselves to the roofs. And the animation of the courts blooming with roses: pages throwing the djerid, arrival of camels, horses pawing the ground, comings and goings of Druses, Marionites, Metaoulis!... The doctor saw nothing; but it must be said in his defence that the palace had hardly been completed, and that in the East the stones, like the women, grow old quickly. The masonry crumbles to dust; the rain pierces the roofs; and the sun, like a skilful magician, gives to the crumbling façades the golden rust and the rose tint of very old ruins. But what is unpardonable in the doctor for not having admired, is the site. Beit-ed-Din is the "Palace of the Waters," with the vaporous mists which mount from the torrent, with the fountains of its mysterious gardens, with the eternal murmur of the humid earth which chants its joy, and the countless cascades and the dropping of the spray which bathes in the dew, and the silvery foam of the numberless streams and frolicsome springs. And down there, at the extremity of the valley, the sea, which presents itself like a pearl at the bottom of a cup. In the environs of Deir-el-Kammar, Lady Hester went to see another chief of the Druses whose authority and influence were very considerable, the Sheik Bechir. He occupied the Palace of Moukhtara, and the doctor, who had more taste for feminine beauty than the poetry of nature, remarked that his wife was beautiful and his children charming.