dine with them. The more a man expends upon his guests, the greater is his reputation and influence; and the few families who pursue an opposite conduct are despised by all the others. Kerek is filled with guests every evening; for the Bedouins, knowing that they are here sure of a good supper for themselves and their horses, visit it as often as they can; they alight at one Medhafe, [p.385] go the next morning to another, and often visit the whole before they depart. The following remarkable custom furnishes another example of their hospitable manners: it is considered at Kerek an unpardonable meanness to sell butter or to exchange it for any necessary or convenience of life; so that, as the property of the people chiefly consists in cattle, and every family possesses large flocks of goats and sheep, which produce great quantities of butter, they supply this article very liberally to their guests. Besides other modes of consuming butter in their cookery, the most common dish at breakfast or dinner, is Fetyte, a sort of pudding made with sour milk, and a large quantity of butter. There are families who thus consume in the course of a year, upwards of ten quintals of butter. If a man is known to have sold or exchanged this article, his daughters or sisters remain unmarried, for no one would dare to connect himself with the family of a Baya el Samin (Arabic), or seller of butter, the most insulting epithet that can be applied to a man of Kerek. This custom is peculiar to the place, and unknown to the Bedouins. The people of Kerek, intermarry with the Bedouins; and the Aeneze even give the Kerekein their girls in marriage. The sum paid to the father of the bride is generally between six and eighthundred piastres; young men without property are obliged to serve the father five or six years, as menial servants, in compensation for the price of the girl. The Kerekein do not treat their wives so affectionately as the Bedouins; if one of them falls sick, and her sickness is likely to prevent her for some time from taking care of the family affairs, the husband sends her back to her father’s house, with a message that “he must cure her;” for, as he says, “I bought a healthy wife of you, and it is not just that I should be at the trouble and expense of curing her.” This is a rule with both Mohammedans and Christians. It is not the custom for the [p.386] husband to buy clothes or articles of dress for his wife; she is, in consequence, obliged to apply to her own family, in order to appear decently in public, or to rob her husband of his wheal and barley, and sell it clandestinely in small quantities; nor does she inherit the smallest trifle of her husband’s property. The Kerekein never sleep under the same blanket with their wives; and to be accused of doing so, is considered as great an insult as to be called a coward.