told all things that
were appointed for him to do. He obeyed the voice from heaven, and
reached the house of Judas in Straight Street. When I reached the
traditional site of the house of Ananias, in the eastern part of the
city, near the gate at the end of Straight Street, I found a
good-natured woman sitting on the pavement just inside the door opening
from the street to what would be called a yard in America. The "house"
has been converted into a small church, belonging to the Catholics, and
it is entirely below the surface. I went down the stairs, and found a
small chamber with an arched ceiling and two altars. I also went out and
visited the old gateway at the end of the street. The masonry is about
thirteen feet thick, and it may be that here Paul, deprived of his
sight, and earnestly desiring to do the will of the Lord, entered the
city so long ago. I then viewed a section of the wall from the outside.
The lower part is ancient, but the upper part is modern, and the portion
that I saw was in a dilapidated condition. "In Damascus," Paul wrote to
the Corinthians, "the governor, under Aretas the king, guarded the city
of the Damascenes in order to take me: and through a window was I let
down in a basket by the wall, and escaped his hands" (2 Cor. 11:32,33).
In some places there are houses so built in connection with the wall
that it would not be a very difficult thing to lower a man from one of
the windows to the ground outside the city.

Mention has already been made of the Arab's opinion of Damascus, and now
I wish to tell how it appeared through my spectacles. The view from the
distance is very pleasing, but when one comes inside the wall and begins
to walk about the streets, the scene changes. The outside of the
buildings is not beautiful. The streets are narrow, crooked, and usually
very dirty; in some cases they are filthy. It seems that all kinds of
rubbish are thrown into the streets, and the dogs are scavengers.
Perhaps no other city has so many dogs. At one place up along the Abana,
now called the Barada, I counted twenty-three of these animals, and a
few steps brought me in sight of five more; but there is some filth that
even Damascus dogs will not clean up. Some of the streets are roughly
paved with stone, but in the best business portion of the city that I
saw there was no pavement and no sidewalk--it was all street from one
wall to the other. I saw a man sprinkling one of the streets with water
carrie