all sorts of vermin, we took with us two tents, and provisions of various kinds, tea, coffee, rice, bread, misle-misle (preserved apricots), and all other portable condiments which the usages of travellers have laid down to be necessary, and which we agreed with our dragomans to find for a stated sum. * Then we took beds (not bedsteads), camp stools, and a folding table, pieces of carpet to spread in the tents, and an abridged and condensed edition of the apparatus of cookery. These preparations, aided by divers unfortunate poultry laid under contribution at every village, indescribable portions of tough meat, which we used publicly to attribute to the sheep of the country, but which I have since convinced myself were more legitimately derivable from the goat, innumerable eggs boiled hard and soft for variety, and milk from the flocks of the bedouin, were sufficient to enable us, if not to live luxuriously, at least to satisfy our hunger. Constant exercise, and exposure to the clear dry air, never failed to supply us with a good appetite.

There is not much in Beyrout itself to detain

* I think a fair average of expences in Syria while travelling is 17., or 100 piastres a day. At the inns in Damascus, Beyrout, and Jerusalem, the charge is about 10s., or 50 piastres.

the traveller. The ancient walls, ruined and shattered (I am afraid we English had something to do with that), no longer enclose the whole population; and the strict and absurd regulations as to closing the gates, which obtain in many of these eastern towns, have been in Beyrout alone modified, if not abolished by the steps of civilization. This improvement, however, is owing to the residence of foreign consuls at this port, some of whom have their houses outside the walls. The manners, also, and activity of the west seem to have obtained here a more solid footing than in any other place which I saw in Palestine, owing, undoubtedly, to the importance of Beyrout as the place where the Mediterranean steamers touch, and to its having become recently the seaport of Damascus. So in the hot and dusty open spaces which are found about Beyrout, the camels are to be seen chewing their cud, or nibbling the withered shrubs, while the dark Arabs of the Haouran encamp their tents, and lie or squat in the sun's glare by day, and murmur wild desert-songs by night. Then the cry of the camel while receiving her burden, loud, sullen, and angry, like the howl of a lioness, arrests an unaccustomed ear in the highways and byways; while the tinkling bells intimate the approach of many a burdened string of these strange-looking

animals, who look as though they had been sojourners in the land since the days of the patriarchs and the Midianites.

There are indisputable evidences in the low arched ruins, and fragments of mosaic pavement, that history has not misled us in affirming Berytus to have been a flourishing Roman colony; but it was down on the rocks bordering the Mediterranean, from our hostel to the sea-girt tower off the quay in the centre of the town, that the vastness of the ancient settlement appeared. Those broken columns, and well-built huge foundations of stones, bricks, and puzzolana, yet brave the restless waters, and attest the excellence and magnitude of Roman works.

'Tis here too that in walking through the illpaved streets, often dark, narrow, and arched over, you stumble on that strangest of human figures, a horned Druse-woman of the Lebanon. Her remarkable head-dress has been often described; it consists of a horn from two to three feet in length, and made of silver or wood, according to the wealth of the wearer. This horn is so fixed by bandages as to project from the centre of the forehead, and generally supports a veil which hangs over the face, nearly concealing it from observation. On examining one of the silver horns, I found it hollow, and resembling in

shape the straight post or mail-horn of our old coaches, but made very light, and highly ornamented with arabesque figures chased on the surface. It is common with travellers to speak of these horns as though they were referred to in the Scripture expressions, "Lift not up your horn so high," "My horn is exalted," "I will make thy horn iron," and other passages of the same tenour. But Robinson has justly observed that the horn was with the ancients an emblem of power and strength, - a notion which might have been suggested by the Egyptian rhinoceros, or, in their own pastoral country, by the he-goat, the ram, or the bull, - all animals singular for their strength.* And that the horn was not a literal one, we may gather from Micah (iv. 13.), "I will make thine horn iron, and I will make thy hoofs brass," where the symbol of strength is continued still further.

M. Alexandre Dumas, however, manages to create a wonderful origin for this horn in a little

* See Daniel, viii. 3, 4. "I saw a ram, which had two horns," &c. . . . "I saw the ram pushing westward, and northward, and southward, so that no beasts might stand before him." Immediately afterwards an he-goat is named, with the same attributes of strength. These were prophetic figures, yet they show that these animals were considered emblems of power.

pamphlet which he wrote upon the re-establishment of the Mount Carmel monastery. "The Druses," he says, 66 were a tribe which descended from those Israelites who worshipped the golden calf; they have preserved the idolatry of their fathers, and the women to this day carry as a headdress the horn of a cow, the poor women (having it) simply taken from the head of the animal, the rich women ornamenting it with silver and gold."* This is a highly entertaining specimen of the sort of rhodomontade which a fashionable author may venture to indulge in, in a land where new ideas, and not well-grounded facts, have been long the order of the day. There are not many Jews in Beyrout, but as it is the port of Damascus and Syria, many pass through the place; in consequence of which, the London Society for promoting Christianity among the Jews has a missionary here, whose very interesting controversies with the Hebrew rabbis, as reported in the journals of the Society, have, it is to be hoped, a beneficial effect upon that people.

* Famille de Druses: c'était une tribu qui descendait de ces Israélites qui adorèrent le veau d'or; ils avaient conservé l'idolatrie de leurs pères, et les femmes aujourd'hui portent encore, pour coîffure, la corne d'une vache, simplement arrachée au front de l'animal chez les femmes pauvres, et argentée, et dorée chez les femmes riches. (p. 5.)