In Society — The Annual Carnival at Beirut College for Women

A spring evening in the heart of Beirut's autumn: souls broke loose in it from the tether of study and work; the gaiety of youth rang out, and spirits swayed with delight to the echo of the music, amid exhilarated airs, dancing boughs, and echoes mingling and rising — in their strutting, magic; in their mingling, rapture!

By his nature man inclines to slip free of the fetters of society and its "formalities" for a while, for he is the son of nature before he is the son of civilization and refinement; and how sweet a release it is in which youth seethes, its flocks fluttering like birds among the dew-moist boughs!

On a knoll defying autumn's pallor with its verdure the fête was held, by the efforts of the College — its administration and its girls, who took their part in the publicity, the distribution of tickets, the acting, then the selling and the display of the handwork woven by small fingers. And how many treasures remain buried, to dissolve in the current of neglect, ignorance, and privation!

The College makes a point of teaching the girl by trial and practice; and behold, she is responsible; behold, she attends to her duties, managing her affairs with tact and self-confidence, her breast open wide, so that when, in the near tomorrow, she presses forward with the procession of life, she will march at a run, with awareness and daring, her experience and practice her best weapon!

The girls wished for variety in the kinds of amusement, and the two ends of the courtyard might have been carried over from the desert of the Arabs: at one crouched the tent of "the fortune-teller, the star-reader," and the other was the playground of a small donkey and a she-camel, which bore with patience and long-suffering the mounting of small and grown alike... A droll game, in an age whose children have all but forgotten that animals exist!

The philosophy of merriment comes forth timid and halting, but at least it wipes clean the spirit of this new generation; perhaps it will rise up with this new temper and turn the page of history — the page of inherited pessimism that we glimpse in the eyes of infants and on the brows of the grown, as though they were the children of despair and gloom, not the children of life and leaping hope!

This fête would have had no worth had it been like all the other fêtes that are held every day and in every place; but it is a lofty idea and a noble aim, looking to the aid of a school that gathers children whose kin have fallen short of their duty of upbringing toward them; and part of the money goes to nourish another project no less important or necessary than the first, for it is spent on the Village Project, whose camp is pitched every summer in the village of Jibrail. Beyond that, some of the students volunteer to help in the work and the teaching, to raise the level of rural society; and in this the girl gains economic and social experience, and comes to understand that a person's success in reaching his goals depends on his effort and his giving.

Individuals are like the screws in this perpetually moving machine — society; and the College's screws were at the summit of activity and giving, and they neither flagged nor rested until the gathering broke up!

Would that every fête held in our society had an aim looking to the aid of some helpless group, or the raising of some neglected quarter — we should then be better than we are, and it would become our right to boast and to declare our approach to a model society whose sons cooperate and join hands to bear it up to the heights. Our hopes hang upon the youth of tomorrow — may God fulfill the hopes!