The Rural Improvement Society invited me to deliver a lecture at its annual festival, and I found myself before an audience of students, among them a number of young men working for the improvement of the Lebanese village, and no small number of villagers who had come down from the mountains especially to attend the celebration. After an opening that met with a certain success, there came to my mind a jest I had once heard from a wag who wished to exaggerate the fine climate of his town and the long lives of its people: he said it had never known a single death, so that they were obliged to put to death an old man far gone in years in order to found a cemetery. This pleasantry of mine found favor with everyone except the back corner of the hall, where I noticed a suspicious com-motion shot through with something nearer to mockery than to laughter.

I finished my speech before its time, driven by an insistent desire to discover the cause of that uproar, and hurried toward its source, cutting my way through the crush of the departing crowd — and there I stood, face to face with a young man of strange appearance, who rushed toward me, his face marked with reproach and pain, saying, “And you too mock me! What is the matter with all of you, that you will not believe?” He was about to say some-thing more, and I was about to clear myself of what he supposed of me, assuring him that I had no knowl-edge of what he meant. But there was no room for that, for a band of the students overtook us; one whis-pered in my ear, “This is a madman escaped from the Asfouriyeh,” and another whispered, “We have been in a long argument with him — he refuses to understand,” and another said, “He claims to come from a village that does not exist in Lebanon!” And the more each of them set me against him, the more curious I grew to know the truth of this man; so I took him by the hand to a quiet corner of the club, and we sat through the second watch of the night, I plying him with coffee and he exchanging talk with me.

The first thing that astonished me, before I heard this young man's story, was his ancient dress, the like of which has not been seen for centuries — a black felt cap of exceeding height, from beneath which black hair hung loose to just above the shoulders; a short cloak