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The princes of the Houses of Shehaab, Kais, and Assaad, and Abdullah, the Habeish and the Eldadah, the great Houses of the Druses, the Djinblat and the Yezbek, the Abuneked, the Talhook, and the Abdel-Malek, were not of this school. Silently, determinedly, unceasing, unsatiated, they proceeded with the great enterprise on which they had embarked.

It was as fully believed in the mountain, by all the Habeishes and the Eldadahs, the Kazins and the Elvasuds, the Elheires, and the Hai-dars, great Maronite families, as well as by the Druse Djinblats and their rivals, the House of Yezbeck, or the House of Talhook, or the House of Abuneked, that the brother of the Queen of England was a guest at Canobia as it was in the stony wilderness of Petrsea.

And the Druse chief of the House of Djezbek, who for five hundred years had never yielded precedence to the House of Djinblat, and Sheikh Fahour Kangé, who since the civil war had never smoked a pipe with a Maronite, but who now gave the salaam of peace to the crowds of Habeishs and Dahdahes who passed by; and Butros Keramy, the nephew of the patriarch, himself a great Sheikh, who inhaled his nargileh as he rode, and who looked to the skies and puffed forth his smoke whenever he met a son of Eblis; and the House of Talhook, and the House of Abdel-Malek and a swarm of Elvasuds, and Elheires, and El Dahers, Emirs and Sheikhs on their bounding steeds, and musketeers on foot, with their light jackets and bare legs and wooden sandals, and black slaves, carrying vases and tubes; everywhere a brilliant and animated multitude, and all mounting the winding steep of Canobia.

Fakredeen had his carpet spread on the marble floor of his principal saloon, and the two Caimacams, Tancred and Bishop Nicodemus, Said Djinblat, the heads of the Houses of Djezbek, Talhook, and Abdel-Malek, Hamood Abune-ked, and five Maronite chieftains of equal consideration, the Emirs of the House of Shehaab, the Habeish, and the Eldadah, were invited to sit with him.

The Talhook and the Abdel-Malek could not be jealous of the Habeish and the Eldadah. He kissed the hand of Bishop Nicodemus, but then he sent his own nargileh to the Emir Ahmet Raslan, who was Caimacam of the Druses. In this strange and splendid scene, Tancred, dressed in a velvet shooting-jacket built in St.

The head of the House of Talhook was asleep with the tube of his nargileh in his mouth; the Yezbek had unwound his turban, cast off his sandals, wrapped himself in his pelisses, and fairly turned in; Bishop Nicodemus was kneeling in a corner and kissing a silver cross; and Hamood Abu-neked had rolled himself up in a carpet, and was snoring as if he were blowing through one of the horns of the Maronites.