THE LEFT-HAND LAND
drop his commonplace appellation in favor of a more dignified one, which perhaps revives an ancient but long neglected designation of his family. This easy putting on and off of names sometimes leads to considerable confusion. I once asked all over a mountain village for the house of a friend whom I had known in Beirut, and met with the most positive assurances that no such person lived there. Fortunately I happened to remember that my friend's father was a baker. "John Baker! Oh, yes, everybody in town knows him! But that other fellow you've been asking about—we never heard of him."
The mountain boys, especially, used often to take new surnames when they came to college. Sometimes they afterward exchanged these for still better ones. So a facetious professor greeted a returning student with "Well, Eliya, what is your name this year?" An exasperated inquirer, who had vainly tried to pin down a certain youth to a satisfactory statement of his chosen titles, finally exclaimed, "Now, tell me, what is your name?" Then came the maddeningly irritating answer which so frequently tempts the Occidental to commit homicide, "As you like, sir!" Another young man, who had narrowly escaped expulsion for his various misdeeds, decided to turn over a new leaf; so he came back to the college the next autumn with a different name—and made it good. The Syrian understands better
[ 21 ]
