Franks can walk with your wives in public, because their faces are
unveiled, and it is _known that they are your wives_, but our women are
so closely veiled that if I should walk with my wife in the street, no
one would know whether I was walking with my own wife or another man's!
You cannot expect a respectable man to put himself into such an
embarrassing position!" No Moslem woman or girl would dare go into the
street without a veil, for fear of personal chastisement from the
husband and father, and the Greek, Maronite and other nominal Christian
women in Syria shrink from exposing their faces, through fear of insult
from the Mohammedans.

When European women, either residents or travellers, pass through the
Moslem quarter of these cities of Syria and Palestine, with faces
unveiled, they are made the theme of the most outrageous and insulting
comments by the Moslem populace. Well is it for the feelings of the most
of these worthy Christian women, that they do not understand the Arabic
language. The Turkish governor of Tripoli was obliged to suppress the
insulting epithets of the Moslems towards European ladies when they
first began to reside there, by the infliction of the bastinado.

In 1857, the Rev. Mr. Lyons in Tripoli, hired Sheikh Owad, a Moslem
bigot, to teach him the Arabic grammar. He was a conceited boor; well
versed in Arabic grammar, but more ignorant of geography, arithmetic and
good breeding than a child. One day Mrs. Lyons passed through the room
where he was teaching Mr. L. and he turned his head away from her and
spat towards her with a look of unutterable contempt. It was the last
time he did it, and he has now become so civilized that he can say good
morning to the wife of a missionary, and even consent to teach the
sacred, pure and undefiled Arabic to a woman! I believe that he has not
yet given his assent to the fact that the earth revolves on its axis,