the house, and brings in a wife from without and _perpetuates the family
name_, the daughter pulls down the house, loses her name, and is lost to
the family.

The wealthier and more aristocratic Druze sitts or ladies are taught to
read by the Fakih or teacher, but the masses of the women are in brutish
ignorance. You enter a Druze house. The woman waits upon you and brings
coffee, but you see only _one eye_, the rest of the head and face being
closely veiled. In an aristocratic house, you would never be allowed to
see the lady, and if she goes abroad, it is only at night, and with
attendants on every side to keep off the profane gaze of strangers. If a
physician is called to attend a sick Druze woman, he cannot see her
face nor her tongue, unless she choose to thrust it through a hole in
her veil. In many cases they suffer a woman to die sooner than have her
face seen by a physician.

The Druzes marry but one wife at a time, and yet divorce is so common
and so heartlessly practiced by the men, that the poor women live in
constant fear of being driven from their homes.

In Abeih, we were startled one evening by the cry "Rouse ye men of self
respect! Come and help us!" It was a dark, rainy night, and the earthen
roof of a Druze house had fallen in, burying a young man, his wife and
his mother, under the mass of earth, stones and timber. They all escaped
death, but were seriously injured, the poor young wife suffering the
most of all, having fallen with her left arm in a bed of burning coals,
and having been compelled to lie there half an hour, so that when dug
out, her hand was burned to a cinder! For several days the husband
refused to send for a doctor, but at length his wife Hala was sent to
the College Hospital (of the Prussian Knights of St. John) in Beirût