I could not obviously claim as much experience as my mature advisers, whose frequent warnings to me to distrust the people of the country thus acquired the force of moral precepts, which it is the secret joy of youth to disobey.
That is the reason why the respectable English residents in Syria figure in these pages as censorious and hostile, with but few exceptions.

They were hostile to my point of view, which was not then avowed, but not to me.

Indeed, so many of them showed me kindness--particularly in my times of illness--that I cannot think of them without a glow of friendliness.

But the attitude of most of them was never mine, and the fact that at the time I still admired that attitude as the correct one, and thought myself at intervals a sad backslider, made it seem forbidding.

In my Oriental life they really were, as here depicted, a disapproving shadow in the background.