Here come two young men to meet us. Fine lads they are too. One is named Giurgius, and the other Leopold. When they were small boys, they once amused me very much. Mr. Yanni, who drew up his flag on the birth of Barbara, sent Giurgius his son, and Leopold his nephew to the school of an old man named Hanna Tooma. This old man always slept in the afternoon, and the boys did not study very well when he was asleep. I was once at Yanni's house when the boys came home from school. They were in high glee. One of them said to his father, our teacher slept all the afternoon, and we appointed a committee of boys to fan him and keep the flies off while the rest went down into the court to play, and when he moved we all hushed up until he was sound asleep again. But when he _did_ wake up, he took the big "Asa" and struck out right and left, and gave every boy in the school a flogging. The father asked, but why did he flog them all? Because he said he knew some of us had done wrong and he was determined to hit the right one, so he flogged us all! See the piles of fruit in the streets! Grapes and figs, watermelons and pomegranates, peaches, pears, lemons and bananas. At other seasons of the year you have oranges, _sweet lemons_, plums, and apricots. There is fresh fruit on the trees here every week in the year. Now we are passing a lemonade stand, where iced lemonade is sold for a cent a glass, cooled with snow from the summit of Mount Lebanon 9000 feet high. Grapes are about a cent a pound and figs the same, and in March you can buy five oranges or ten sweet lemons for a cent. Huge watermelons are about eight or ten cents a piece. We buy so many pounds of milk and oil and potatoes and charcoal. The prickly pear, or subire, is a delicious fruit, although covered with sharp barbed spines and thorns. It is full of hard large woody seeds, but the people are very fond of the fruit. Sheikh Nasif el Yazijy was a famous Arab poet and scholar, and a young man once brought him a poem to be corrected. He told him to call in a few days and get it. He came again and the Sheikh said to him. "Your poem is like the Missionary's prickly pear!" "The Missionary's prickly pear?" said the young poet. "What do you mean?" "Why," said the Sheikh, "Dr. ---- a missionary, when he first came to Syria, had a dish of prickly pears set before him to eat. Not liking to eat the seeds, he began to pick them out, and when he had picked out all the seeds, there was nothing left! So your poem. You asked me to remove the errors, and I found that when I had taken out all the errors, there was nothing left." It is about time for us to start. We will ride through the orange gardens and see the rich fruit bending the trees almost down to the ground. Steer your way carefully through the crowd of mules, pack horses, camels and asses loaded with boxes of fruit hastening down to the Meena for the steamer which goes North to-night.