I was recommended by a Syrian who spoke French--like everyone else in Beyrouth--to put up in a small hotel on the quay, and was given a room overlooking the harbour, with a little verandah in front, where one must sit warily, for dirty locomotives shunting in the street had a way of stopping just underneath and firing with a particularly poisonous kind of coal, the while they blew off steam from remarkably noisy safety-valves. This was the terminus of the Lebanon Tramway, which crawls up the hills to a point called Rayak. The hotel, kept by a Turk, was clean and cool, but to feed one had to go round the corner to a kind of restaurant, “à la ferang,” where an incongruous party of pilgrims of every race returning from Mecca sat uneasily on small chairs, and regarded with distrust the array of knives and forks a Greek waiter set before them. [Sidenote: AT BEYROUTH] Beyrouth--once one of the greatest maritime cities of the Phœnicians, when Tyre sent out her ships to the Tin Islands--has grown since then, and is now a flourishing and picturesque city, built upon the slopes of the hills that separate Syria from the Mediterranean. The population is, I should think, mostly Christian, and only in the alleys of a small bazaar does one see the real signs of an Oriental city. For the rest, there are broad and dusty roads, a large public square and gardens, and electric tramways everywhere. The language of the place is more French than Arabic, and English receives good attention at the American college there. Like Haifa and Tripoli on the same coast, it is on a little point of land and faces north, protecting its harbour by a strong sea-wall, enclosing a deep basin. In the East one looks out as the first preparation for any journey, what the Turk calls a “youldāsh,” and the Persian a “hamrāh,” or travelling companion. On this occasion and without looking for him, he appeared, in the person of a Konia Turk, who was staying in the same hotel. We were to leave at sunset for Aleppo by the train, and my fortunate meeting with him, though our conversation was perforce limited owing to my ignorance of Turkish, enlightened me to the fact that we should be twenty-four hours _en route_, and must take pretty well whatever we wanted to eat with us. So we made an excursion to the native bazaar, and from the sellers of comestibles in baskets, procured a large quantity of excellent oranges and some bread and various kinds of sweet cakes.