The poor father left no means untried to find her. He wrote to Damascus,
Alexandria, and Aleppo, describing the child and begged his friends
everywhere to watch for her, and send him word if they found her. There
was one mark on the child, which, he said, would be certain to
distinguish her. When she was a baby, and nursing at her mother's
breast, her mother upset a little cup of scalding hot coffee upon the
child's breast, which burned it to a blister, leaving a scar which could
not be removed. This sign the father described, and his friends aided
him in trying to find the little girl. They went to the encampments of
the gypsies and looked at all the children, but all in vain. The father
journeyed by land and by sea. Hearing of a little girl in Aleppo who
could not give an account of herself, he went there, but it was not his
child. Then he went to Damascus and Alexandria, and at length hearing
that a French Countess in Marseilles had a little Syrian orphan girl
whose parents were not known, he sent to Marseilles and examined the
girl, but she was _not his child_. Months and years passed on, but the
father never ceased to speak and think of that little lost girl. The
mother too was almost distracted.
At length light came. Nine years had passed away, and the Beirut people
had almost forgotten the story of the lost Damascene girl. Your uncle S.
and your Aunt A. were sitting in their house one day, in Tripoli, when
Tannoos, the boy, brought word that a man and woman from Beirut wished
to see them. They came in and introduced themselves. They were Khalil,
the father of the little lost girl, and his sister, who had heard that
Zahidy was in Tripoli, and had come to search for her. The mother was
not able to leave home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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