Boyhood and girlhood are shorter in Palestine than in America, but often merry. Stories illustrating the preference for boys among Oriental parents are plentiful, but no one who examines the society of the Orient will fail to find that it could not well be otherwise without very great changes. Boys increase the size, force, wealth and importance of the family. When they marry they bring home their wives and the children perpetuate the house of the father. Should the husband die, the wife and her boy children may be assisted by her husband’s relatives, the boys certainly. Should the mother of the boys marry again, the boys go from her to be brought up by her former husband’s family. Boys increase the house, girls decrease it. The earnings of the father and the sons go to provide a substantial family dwelling and to defend the house against adverse circumstances. Girls are sure to marry and, although they bring in a money payment to their fathers, yet in every other respect they are a disadvantage, as they go to strengthen another house, not the house where they were fed and reared. But there is not an iron-clad observance of an inhuman rule here as some seem to imagine. All customs strange to our Western ideas may surely be supposed to be grounded in very human causes and to be very natural after all. Many parents are very fond of their girls. Relations through the mother’s family and through sisters are often highly esteemed. One evening two fatherless little girls belonging to a Moslem tribe in el-Bîreh were going home from Râm Allâh and were caught in a heavy hail and thunder-storm just behind our house. Knowing that they would be endangered we went out to bring them into the house until the storm should pass. We found them very frightened and cowering in the poor defense of a wall. They were soon quite happy after we had dried and fed them. But, just as in any other country, there were anxious mother-hearts a mile away in el-Bîreh, and soon those mothers were out in the storm, having enlisted two men and two boys in their eager search for the little girls. Their terror was changed to keen pleasure when they found the children safely sheltered from harm. As the demands of the tribal life become less imperative, following the improvement of social and general governmental conditions, the customs of the people approach more nearly those of other nations.