The most thickly settled portion of Damascus is the graveyard. A picture taken at risk of mobbing
He turned in at a gate that gave admittance to a large walled inclosure. From the doors and down the outside stairways of a large building in its center poured a multitude of boys and youths, in drab-colored uniforms, shrieking words of welcome. A young man at the head of the throng reached me first.
“They students,” he cried; “I am teacher. This American Mission College. They always run to see white man because they study white man’s language and country!”
Every class in the institution, evidently, had been dismissed that they might attend an illustrated lecture on anthropology. The students formed a circle about me, and the “teacher” marched round and round me, discoursing on the various points of my person and dress that differed from the native, as glibly as any medical failure over a cadaver.
“Will you, kind sir,” he said, pausing for breath, “will you show to my students the funny things with which the white man holds up his stockings?”
I refused the request, indignantly, of course—the bare thought of such immodesty! Besides, those important articles of my attire had long since been gathered into the bag of a Marseilles rag-picker.
I moved towards the gate.
“Wait, sir,” cried the tutor, “very soon the American president of the school comes. He will give you supper and bed.”
“I’ll pay my own,” I answered.