FEOM BAALBEK TO DAMASCUS. 
249 
have fought upon a pinch, but I believe we preferred not fight¬ 
ing. For my own part, I had made up my mind, if attacked 
by tfye robbers, to offer them my old coat, two shirts, a tooth¬ 
brush, a small pocket comb, some sketches of Baalbek, and a 
few short-hand notes from which these pages are written, to¬ 
gether with a draft on my friend the Southerner, who was 
kindly paying my way to Alexandria, where I expected a re¬ 
mittance. I had likewise about me some small paper money, 
amounting to twenty kreutzers (sixteen cents), payable in 
Austria in the course of forty or fifty years ; a letter of intro¬ 
duction to the Pasha of Egypt, two Seidlitz powders, and a 
pocket-compass, which, together with an expired commission 
as third lieutenant in the revenue service, I intended de¬ 
livering to the chief of the robbers sooner than shed one drop 
of blood, and requesting him as a favor to take any thing else 
about my person or in my knapsack that he might find use¬ 
ful. Fortunately, however, for the reader and myself, we 
met no robbers, or, if we did, they were so terribly afraid of 
us that they passed on without shooting. 
We soon came into the beautiful and fertile neighborhood 
of Zebdene. Signs of civilization, such as we had not seen 
since leaving Beirut, began to appear on both sides of the 
road. Every thing quite reminded us of home. The road 
was broad and plain, and the gardens were well hedged with 
bushes. Rustic gateways, covered with running roses, peep¬ 
ed out from clumps of trees; the gurgling of springs and the 
soft echo of distant voices made a pleasant music in the night 
air; and as we rode along under the shade of overhanging 
trees, and looked through the vistas of foliage on each side, 
the running vines hanging in festoons through the vineyards, 
and the groves of fig trees and olives were lit up with a glow 
of moonlight, and vividly brought to mind our early impres¬ 
sions of the beauties of Eden. As we entered the village, it 
was a pleasant variety to find none of that shadowless and 
parched appearance about it that characterized all the vil¬ 
lages we had seen before. The houses were half hidden 
among trees, with little green patches of ground about them, 
and though rudely constructed of mud and stone, like all we 
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