is
by the intercession of such as these that the superstitious hope to
obtain earthly and heavenly benefits, and it is at the shrines of such
as these that the poor Moslem women come, in the dark days of trouble,
to pour out their hearts and seek for help and blessing.

Some time ago one of my schoolgirls asked me to go and see her sister,
who had been brought from a neighboring village seriously ill. On
reaching the house I found a young woman of about eighteen stretched on
a mattress on the floor, and sitting by her side, her husband, who was
at least fifty years of age. The poor creature was in great suffering
and evidently too ill for any simple remedy, so I called in the help of
a French lady doctor, who kindly came and prescribed for her.

On going to the house next day, great was my surprise to find that the
medicine ordered had not been given, and the surprise gave place to
indignation when I discovered that the family firmly believed that the
whole trouble was caused by an evil spirit which had taken possession of
the young wife, and that the black sheep, tied up in the courtyard, had
been placed there in the hope that the demon would prefer to inhabit the
body of the animal and might thus be induced to leave its present
abode. Poor young thing! She died not long after, but her friends to
this day believe that they did all in their power to help her, and her
death could not have been averted since it was surely _decreed_.

The veil that shrouds the Moslem home life in Tunis has been raised and
my readers have had a peep at its sadder side, but it is only a peep!
The farther one penetrates the more intolerable its noisome atmosphere
becomes. Deceit and lying are so prevalent that a mother questions the
simplest statements of her own son, and I have seen a mistress insist on
a servant swearing on the Koran before she would accept his word.
Demoralizing conversation is freely indulged in before the children,
till their minds become depraved to such an extent that in our school we
could not allow the girls to tell each other stories or even ask riddles
because of their indecent character; and bad language, even from the
little ones, was a thing with which we constantly had to contend.

And now we, to whom God has given so much light and so many privileges,
are brought face to face with the problem, What can be done to help our
Mohammedan sisters to lift the burdens which mar the happiness of so
many lives?

I