re her home, is constantly before her.

A Protestant woman recently told me that she had let some of her rooms
to a Mohammedan family from Hums. The man was intelligent and the wife
was an attractive young woman with a little girl. The man told her in
the presence of his wife that when he went back to Hums he thought he
should take another wife. "Why do you do that when you are so happy as
you are? Think of your wife--how unhappy it would make her to have you
bring in another!" The man laughed and told her that she made a great
mistake in thinking that Mohammedan women were like Christian women,
that they did not mind having another woman in the house, they were
accustomed to it and brought up to expect it. "But I hope that what I
said will make him think and perhaps he will decide not to take another
wife, for I showed him plainly the evil of it."

The women may be brought up to expect it,--they may have been the
members of a polygamous family themselves,--but the human heart is the
same the world over, and the sanctity of the home with one wife is never
invaded without poignant suffering. A wealthy Mohammedan will establish
each of his wives in a separate house, those not able to afford this
luxury have their harem in one house. It does not require a very vivid
imagination to be able to picture the inevitable result: jealousies,
heartburnings, contentions, wranglings, and worse.

A Bible woman told me of dreadful scenes where the women fight like cats
and dogs, and the husband takes the part of the wife he loves the best
and beats the others. One feels that the man often bears his own
punishment for this state of things by being obliged to live amid such
scenes.

In a city of Northern Syria where the Mohammedans are the most powerful
class and their haughtiness and contempt of women so great that they
will elbow a foreign woman into the gutter, not necessarily because she
is a Christian, but because she is a woman, a Syrian woman whispered
during a walk: "Look at that man over there, I'll tell you about him
later." And afterwards she explained that the man was a neighbor and he
had just taken his fourth wife, and she was only ten years old. He was
an elderly man with gray hair.

One well-known and wealthy Mohammedan had splendid establishments in
four different places and he is said to have had thirty sons. Another
brought home an English wife, with whom he had lived ten years in
England, and established her in a