ners are good and his prices are low. The soft-voiced women and
lustrous-eyed girls who hang about the Lady's tent, persuading her to
buy their small embroideries and lace-work and trinkets, are gentle and
ingratiating, though persistent.
I am honestly of the opinion that Christian mission-schools and
hospitals have done a great deal for Nazareth. We go this morning to
visit the schools of the English Church Missionary Society, where Miss
Newton is conducting an admirable and most successful work for the girls
of Nazareth. She is away on a visit to some of her outlying stations;
but the dark-eyed, happy-looking Syrian teacher shows us all the
classes. There are five of them, and every room is full and bright and
orderly.
On the Christian side, the older girls sing a hymn for us, in their high
voices and quaint English accent, about Jesus stilling the storm on
Galilee, and the intermediate girls and the tiny co-educated boys and
girls in the kindergarten go through various pretty performances. Then
the teacher leads us across the street to the two Moslem classes, and we
cannot tell the difference between them and the Christian children,
except that now the singing of "Jesus loves me" and the recitation of
"The Lord is my Shepherd" are in Arabic. There is one blind girl who
recites most perfectly and eagerly. Another girl of about ten years
carries her baby-brother in her arms. Two little laggards, (they were
among the group at our camp early in the morning), arrive late, weeping
out their excuses to the teacher. She hears them with a kind, humorous
look on her face, gives them a soft rebuke and a task, and sends them to
their seats, their tears suddenly transformed to smiles.
From the schools we go to the hospital of the British Medical Mission, a
little higher up the hill. We find young Doctor Scrimgeour, who has
lately come out from Edinburgh University, and his white-uniformed,
cheerful, busy nurses, tasked to the limit of their strength by the
pressure of their work, but cordial and simple in their welcome. As I
walk with the doctor on his rounds I see every ward full, and all kinds
of calamity and suffering waiting for the relief and help of his kind,
skilful knife. Here are hernia, and tuberculous glands, and cataract,
and stone, and bone tuberculosis, and a score of other miseries; and
there, on the table, with pale, dark face and mysterious eyes, lies a
man whose knee has been shattered by a ball from a Mart
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