of whom he had experience, princes, pashas, and some
others, and from the great transactions with which he was connected,
he was convinced that all was a matter of force or fraud. Fakredeen
preferred the latter, because it was more ingenious, and because he was
of a kind and passionate temperament, loving beauty and the beautiful,
apt to idealise everything, and of too exquisite a taste not to shrink
with horror from an unnecessary massacre.

Though it was his profession and his pride to simulate and to dissemble,
he had a native ingenuousness which was extremely awkward and very
surprising, for, the moment he was intimate with you, he told you
everything. Though he intended to make a person his tool, and often
succeeded, such was his susceptibility, and so strong were his
sympathetic qualities, that he was perpetually, without being aware of
it, showing his cards. The victim thought himself safe, but the teeming
resources of Fakredeen were never wanting, and some fresh and brilliant
combination, as he styled it, often secured the prey which so heedlessly
he had nearly forfeited. Recklessness with him was a principle of
action. He trusted always to his fertile expedients if he failed, and
ran the risk in the meanwhile of paramount success, the fortune of those
who are entitled to be rash. With all his audacity, which was nearly
equal to his craft, he had no moral courage; and, if affairs went wrong,
and, from some accident, exhaustion of the nervous system, the weather,
or some of those slight causes which occasionally paralyse the creative
mind, he felt without a combination, he would begin to cry like a
child, and was capable of any action, however base and humiliating, to
extricate himself from the impending disaster.

Fakredeen had been too young to have fatally committed himself during
the Egyptian occupation. The moment he found that the Emir Bescheer and
his sons were prisoners at Constantinople, he returned to Syria, lived
quietly at his own castle, affected popularity among the neighbouring
chieftains, who were pleased to see a Shehaab among them, and showed
himself on every occasion a most loyal subject of the Porte. At
seventeen years of age, Fakredeen was at the head of a powerful party,
and had opened relations with the Divan. The Porte looked upon him with
confidence, and although they intended, if possible, to govern Lebanon
in future themselves, a young prince of a great house, and a young
prince so per