ion are spent at the cafe or the more
aristocratic rendezvous--the barber's shop--and the charms of sweet home
life he has never imagined.

Year by year, however, Western education is slowly but surely telling on
the Oriental mind. The young men, trained in French schools and imbibing
modern ideas, show a strong tendency to follow the manners and customs
of their teachers, and it is at least considered more "comme-il-faut" to
take only one wife and in some measure copy the European "menage."

_Divorce_ is, however, the great _curse_ which blights domestic
happiness, and words fail me to describe the misery it brings.

The Moslem population of the city of Tunis is sixty thousand. Setting
aside men and children there remain, roughly speaking, about twenty-five
thousand women, and comparing my own experience with that of other lady
missionaries we are agreed in affirming that the majority of these women
in the middle and lower classes have been divorced at least once in
their lives, many of them two or three times, while some few have had a
number of husbands. In the upper class and wealthy families divorce is
not nearly so common, and for obvious reasons.

I have never known a man to have thirty or forty wives in succession as
one hears of in some Mohammedan lands. A man once told my brother-in-law
that he had been married eighteen times, and I heard of another who had
taken (the Arab expression) twelve wives, one after another; but this
last was related with bated breath as being an unusual and opprobrious
act.

When a woman is divorced she returns to her father's house and remains
dependent on him until he finds her another husband, her monetary value
being now greatly reduced. The quarrel which led to the separation is
sometimes adjusted and she returns to her husband, but _never_ if he has
pronounced the words, "Tulka be thalethe" (Divorce by three, or
threefold). This, even though uttered in a moment of anger, may never
be recalled, and if he really care for his wife and wish to take her
back again, she must be married to another man and divorced by him
before she can return to her first husband. But the laws relating to
marriage, divorce, and the guardianship of the children, would require a
volume to themselves and cannot be entered upon here.

One is led to ask, what is the cause of this dark cloud of evil which
casts its terrible shadow over so many homes?

No doubt it chiefly arises from the low standard