was but one poor fellow that wagged his tongue, and him, in the open streets, Dthemetri horse-whipped. During my stay I went wherever I chose, and attended the public baths without molestation. Indeed my relations with the pleasanter portion of the Mahometan population were upon a much better footing here than at most other places.
In the principal streets of Damascus there is a path for foot passengers, which is raised, I think, a foot or two above the bridle road. Until the arrival of the British Consul-general, none but a Mussulman had been permitted to walk upon the upper way; Mr. Farren would not, of course, suffer that the humiliation of any such exclusion should be submitted to by an Englishman, and I always walked upon the raised path as free and unmolested as if I had been striding through Bond Street; the old usage was, however, maintained with as much strictness as ever against the Christian Rayahs and Jews; not one of them could have set his foot upon the privileged path without endangering his life.
I was lounging one day, I remember, along "the paths of the faithful," when a Christian Rayah from the bridle-road below saluted me with such earnestness, and craved so anxiously to speak, and be spoken to, that he soon brought me to a halt; he had nothing to tell, except only the glory and exultation with which he saw a fellow Christian stand level with the imperious Mussulmans; perhaps he had been absent from the place for some time, for otherwise I hardly know how it could have happened that my exaltation was the first instance he had seen. His joy was great; so strong and strenuous was England (Lord Palmerston reigned in those days) that it was a pride and de
bold project of penetrating to the University of Oxford, and this, notwithstanding that he had been in his infancy (they begin very young those Americans) an Unitarian preacher. Having a notion, it seems, that the Ambassadorial character would protect him from insult, he adopted the stratagem of procuring credentials from his government as Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of her Britannic Majesty; he also wore the exact costume of a Trinitarian, but all his contrivances were vain; Oxford disdained and rejected him (not because he represented a swindling community, but) because that his infantine sermons were strictly remembered against him; the enterprise failed.
