nd repose.

How glorious were the colours spread over the vast extent of mountain and
sea, modified by length of shadows as the sun declined! Oh how deep are
such beauties and the perception of their value laid in the innermost
recesses of our soul's nature, only to be completely gratified in the
eternity to come. Here, below, we have gorgeous tints differing in
succession, even after actual sunset, to be followed by a delicate
after-glow, which again gives place to the splendour of night. And as in
earth, so in heaven, with the exception of night; for surely there will
be alternations of beauteous scenes above; surely there will be
developments and variety in light, colour, music, harmony, and the rest
of those "pleasures for evermore," which are everywhere emanations from
the direct love of "Him who first loved us,"--His gifts, who even here
bestows prismatic hues upon icebergs in the arctic circle, and a rosy
flush to the peaks of Jebel Sanneen in the Lebanon.

_Monday_.--Letters were brought at a late hour last night in four hours
from Bayroot, giving recent intelligence from our fleet--all political
affairs going on successfully.

Everybody speaks well of our host the governor, and his family. He is a
studious man, and has acquired from the Americans a good deal of history
and general knowledge; his youngest brother attends the natural-history
class of the mission-school. He is a relative of the famous Abu Neked,
and his wife (Druses have but one wife each) is of the Jonblat family.
The ancestral mansion he inhabits was built by one of the ancient race
called the T'noohh, who flourished there from the 10th to the 17th
century, and artists had been brought for the purpose from
Constantinople; the symmetry of the masonry is admirable, and
consequently the shadows formed from it are particularly straight and
sharp in outline.

The village contains specimens of every form of religion to be found
throughout the Lebanon; each sect, however, keeps somewhat apart from the
rest, which practice being common in the mountain, may account for the
villages appearing to a stranger to consist of separate pieces not quite
joined together.

Some women still wear horns, although the Christian clergy set themselves
strongly against these ornaments; some even refusing the
Communion-Sacrament to those who persist in retaining that heathenish
emblem derived from ancient mythology.

Among the Druse men, the 'Akal are not so ma