In 1876, Eli Jones, Alfred Lloyd Fox, and Henry Newman again visited the Holy Land, and especially the slope of Mount Lebanon. A meeting was held there, and Eli Jones read an epistle from the foreign mission committee appointed by New England yearly meeting, expressing the belief that a meeting should be organized at Brummana. After deliberation a meeting was organized in the usual manner, consisting of six native Christians and the family of T. Waldmeier.
During this same visit they started a boys' training-home. The winter was spent in getting the training-home ready to open and putting it on a proper working basis. A house was rented from one of the emirs of Mount Lebanon, in which the boys of the mountain began to be trained. This house and the one occupied by T. Waldmeier were those in which lived the two emirs who gave the order to burn the Bibles and Testaments of the early American missionaries. The spot is still marked near the training-home where these Bibles were burnt, and some of the inhabitants still live there who helped execute the order; so that the children of the men who put fire to the Bible are now being taught on this same spot from this same book.
In the spring of 1880 an appeal was made for a girls' training-home at Brummana, T. Waldmeier judging the cost of building and current expenses would be about ninety-five pounds. Not long after Eli Jones wrote: "At our New England yearly meeting thy appeal for a girls' training-home was read, and elicited a ready and remarkable response. Soon after the meeting we found that the subscription had reached eleven hundred dollars. The women Friends of New York yearly meeting also raised two hundred dollars, thus making thirteen hundred dollars in the hands of our treasurer, George Howland, for the purpose of erecting a home for girls on Mount Lebanon."
So much money was collected that during the winter Eli Jones in the name of the committee authorized the work to begin, and on the 27th of 10th month, 1882, the new building was completed. Eli Jones, then in his seventy-sixth year, again crossed the water to be present at the dedication of it. Three hundred persons, among them princes and princesses, were there to see and hear the ceremony. Eli Jones read Prov. xxxi., and spoke for an hour and fifteen minutes on the subject of female education. The fifteen girls who were to be educated sat in a semicircle on chairs before Eli Jones, and stood up and sang a hymn at the close of the meeting. Charles M. Jones of Winthrop, Maine, had attended Eli, and they worked for three months to accomplish the transference of the mission into the hands of three English and three American trustees. The management of the work was considerably remodelled during this winter. It is a difficult matter to obtain a perfectly clear title to land in Palestine, and the Friends were obliged to go through eight different courts before the affair was thoroughly settled.
The Ramallah Friends' mission was visited, and much was done to encourage the workers there. New England Friends at present are earnest to accomplish much good at Ramallah, and there has been a striking liberality manifested by them in this field. Eli Jones, now in his eighty-second year, can never again visit in the body these two spots which he fondly loves, but he rejoices in his last days that the cause so near his heart is receiving so warm a support, and the advance which has been made prophesies the day when the Syrian wife shall have a woman's voice and a woman's power, and when the marvellous blessing of Christ's immeasurable love shall be felt in the hearts of those who now sit in darkness, though in the land where "the great Light has shined."
[CHAPTER XIII.]
LETTERS FROM SYRIA.
Eli and Sybil Jones were most cordially liberated by Friends for the work in Europe, which was shown them as a field white unto harvest in which they were called to labor. They set sail from Boston in the ship "China," 4th mo. 10th, 1867. They attended Dublin and London yearly meetings, and visited the meetings throughout England, and then carried their labors into Scotland. Of the visit in this country Eli Jones writes to the Friends' Review: