After a little the Kadi said, “it is enough.  This girl is the daughter of Kahlil Ferah.  Sir, take your child, and Allah be with you!”

The father wiped away the tears and said, “Your Excellency, you see this poor girl all tattooed and disfigured.  You see how ignorant and feeble she is.  If she were not my child, there is nothing about her to make me wish to take her.  But she is my own darling child, and with all her faults and infirmities, I love her.”  The whole Council then arose and congratulated the father and mother, and a great crowd accompanied them home.  Throngs of people came to see her and congratulate the family, and after a little the girl was sent to a boarding school.

I can hardly think over this story even now without tears, for I think how glad I should have been to get back again a child of mine if it had been lost.  And I have another thought too about that little lost girl.  If that father loved his daughter so as to search and seek for her, and expend money, and travel by land and sea for years, in trying to find her, and when at length he found her, so forlorn and wretched and degraded, yet loved her still because she was his daughter, do you not think that Jesus loves us even more?  We were lost and wretched and forlorn.  A worse being than Bedawin gypsies has put his mark on our hearts and our natures.  We have wandered far, far away.  We have served the world, and forgotten our dear Heavenly Father.  We have even refused to receive Him when he has come near us.  Yet Jesus came to seek and to save us.  And when he found us so degraded and sinful and disfigured, He loved us still, because we are His own children.  Don’t you think that the little lost Damascene girl was thankful when she reached her home, and was loved and kindly treated by father and mother and relatives and friends?  And ought we not to be very thankful when Jesus brings us home, and calls us “dear children” and opens the gate of heaven to us?

This story of the lost Damascene child calls to my mind a little song which the Maronite women in Lebanon sing to their babies as a lullaby.  The story is that a Prince’s daughter was stolen by the Bedawin Arabs, and carried to their camp.  She grew up and was married to a Bedawin Sheikh and had a little son.  One day a party of muleteers came to the camp selling grapes, and she recognized them as from her own village.  She did not dare speak to them, so she began to sing a lullaby to her baby, and motioned to the grape-sellers to come near, and when the Bedawin were not listening, she would sing them her story in the same tone as the lullaby.

THE LULLABY.

Sleep, baby sleep! a sleep so sweet and mild,
Sleep, my Arab boy, my little Bedawin child!
Aside to the } Once I was a happy girl,
grape-sellers } The Prince Abdullah’s daughter. 
Playing with the village maids,