masses of the women are in brutish
ignorance. You enter a Druze house. The woman waits upon you and brings
coffee, but you see only _one eye_, the rest of the head and face being
closely veiled. In an aristocratic house, you would never be allowed to
see the lady, and if she goes abroad, it is only at night, and with
attendants on every side to keep off the profane gaze of strangers. If a
physician is called to attend a sick Druze woman, he cannot see her
face nor her tongue, unless she choose to thrust it through a hole in
her veil. In many cases they suffer a woman to die sooner than have her
face seen by a physician.

The Druzes marry but one wife at a time, and yet divorce is so common
and so heartlessly practiced by the men, that the poor women live in
constant fear of being driven from their homes.

In Abeih, we were startled one evening by the cry "Rouse ye men of self
respect! Come and help us!" It was a dark, rainy night, and the earthen
roof of a Druze house had fallen in, burying a young man, his wife and
his mother, under the mass of earth, stones and timber. They all escaped
death, but were seriously injured, the poor young wife suffering the
most of all, having fallen with her left arm in a bed of burning coals,
and having been compelled to lie there half an hour, so that when dug
out, her hand was burned to a cinder! For several days the husband
refused to send for a doctor, but at length his wife Hala was sent to
the College Hospital (of the Prussian Knights of St. John) in Beirut
where Dr. Post amputated the hand below the elbow.

One would naturally suppose that such a calamity, in which both so
narrowly escaped death, would bind husband and wife together in the
strongest bonds of affection and sympathy. But not so in this case. The
poor young wife is now threatened with divorce, because she is no longer
of any use to her husband, and her two little children are to be taken
from her! She lies on her bed in the Hospital, the very picture of
stoical resignation. Not a groan or complaint escapes her.

She said one day, "Oh how glad I am that this happened, for it has taken
away all my sins, and I shall never have to suffer again in this world
or the next!" This is the doctrine of the Druzes, and, cold and false as
it is, she has made it her support and her stay.

Dr. Post and Mrs. Bliss have pointed her to the Lamb of God "who bore
our sins in His own body on the tree," and she seems interested to he