The Sherifs, or descendants of Mohammed, resident at Mekka and in the neighbourhood, who delight in arms, and are so often engaged in civil broils, have a practice of sending every male child, eight days after its birth, to some tent of the neighbouring Bedouins, where it is brought up with the children of the tent, and educated like a true Bedouin for eight or ten years, or till the boy is able to mount a mare, when his father takes him back to his home. During the whole of the above period, the boy never visits his parents, nor enters the town, except when in his sixth month; his foster-mother then carries him on a short visit to his family, and immediately returns with him to her tribe. The child is, in no instance, left longer than thirty days after his birth in the hands of his mother; and his stay among the Bedouins is sometimes protracted till his thirteenth or fifteenth year. By this means, he becomes familiar with all the perils and vicissitudes of a Bedouin life; his body is inured to fatigue and privation; and he acquires a knowledge of the pure language of the Bedouins, and an influence among them that becomes afterwards of much importance to him. There is no sherif, from the chief down to the poorest among them, who has not been brought up among the Bedouins; and many of them are also married to Bedouin girls. The sons of the reigning Sherif family were usually educated among the tribe of Adouan, celebrated for the prowess and hospitality of its members; but it has been so much reduced by the intestine wars of the Sherifs, in which they always took part, and by the late invasion of Mohammed Aly, that they found it expedient to abandon the territory of the Hedjaz, and seek refuge in the encampments of the tribes of the Eastern plain. Othman el Medhayfe, the famous Wahaby chief, a principal instrument employed by Saoud in the subjugation of the Hedjaz, was himself a Sheikh of Adouan; and Sherif Ghaleb had married his sister. The other Sherifs [p.230] sent their children to the encampments of Hodheyl, Thekyf, Beni Sad, and others; some few to the Koreysh, or Harb.