flint on his tongue and a spark in his eyes, he will make the neophite Habib smile beside him.
For the priesthood in Syria is not, as we have said, a peeled, polished, pulpy affair. And Khalid’s father has been long enough in their employ to learn somewhat of their methods. Bigotry, cruelty, and tyranny at home, priestcraft and Jesuitism abroad—these, O Khalid, you will know better by force of contact before you end. And you will begin to pine again for your iron-loined spiritual Mother.
Ay, and the scelerate Jesuit will even make capital of your mass of flowing hair. For in this country, only the native priests are privileged to be shaggy and scrubby and still be without suspicion. But we will let Shakib give us a few not uninteresting details of the matter.
“Not long after we had rejoined our people,” he writes, “Khalid comes to me with a sorry tale. In truth, a fortnight after our arrival in Baalbek—our civility towards newcomers seldom enjoys a longer lease—the town was alive with rumours and whim-whams about my friend. And whereso I went, I was not a little annoyed with the tehees and grunts which his name seemed to invoke. The women often came to his mother to inquire in particular why he grows his hair and shaves his mustaches; the men would speak to his father about the change in his accent and manners; the children teheed and tittered whenever he passed through the town-square; and all were of one mind that Khalid was a worthless fellow, who had brought nothing with him from the Paradise of the New World but his cough and his fleece.
Such tattle and curiosity, however, no matter what degree of savage vulgarity they reach, are quite harmless. But I felt somewhat uneasy about him, when I heard the people asking each other, ‘Why does he not come to Church like honest folks?’ And soon I discovered that my apprehensions were well grounded; for the questioning was noised at