that so plentifully cover the whole country, that while free to follow their pastoral prepossessions, they had also, on every side, all the advantages of a stirring, civilised population, and a region capable of yielding everything they

could wish.

CHAPTER XIII.

GAZA TO FALUJEH.

I STARTED from Gaza to Hebron on the 2nd of March, with three horses, three donkeys, and four men, the donkeys carrying two tents and other requisites. Of the four men, the first was a black from the Soudan, but he could not tell his birthplace. A red fez; a loose old cloth jacket reaching to his thighs, the elbows showing themselves prominently through the short sleeves; a striped black-andwhite petticoat of mixed cotton and wool, and cotton drawers, encased his tall thin figure, which terminated in bare legs, and ancient leather slippers with no backs. He had married in Gaza, was perhaps five-and-twenty, and laughed pleasantly all the time. Hamet, the second donkey-man, who was also young, wore a white cotton skull-cap, with red worsted-work setting it off at the edges; a wide blue cotton jacket reaching to his thighs, with a triangle of striped cotton, edged with red, for an ornament, down the back; a striped cotton petticoat, over a blue one, coming down to his knees; his legs and feet rejoicing in freedom. The third, Redwan, hardly a man, but very manly, had a blue cotton gaberdine with sleeves, and over it a sleeveless, close-fitting, old brown-and-white woollen "abba;" a woollen skull-cap, with a handkerchief tied round it, to make it a turban; his brown legs and feet were naked. The fourth, Hajji Iesa-" Pilgrim Jesus"!—a middleaged man, who had earned his title of " Hajji" by having been at Mecca, wore a dirty white turban, a white thick

cotton sack over his shirt and down to his calves, and a leathern girdle or belt round his waist to keep his clothes together; his legs and feet being bare.

A fifth person joined our cavalcade, to take advantage of our company, a tall, thin man, on a donkey so small that his feet just escaped the ground. He was a colporteur, employed in selling Bibles and Testaments over the country, and he proposed to go with us as far as Beit Jibrin. Of light-brown complexion, with a long face and long Syrian nose, but a pleasant-looking man, with his great black eyes, he was decked out in a fez; a striped blue-and-white cotton, sleeved, sack, reaching to his calves; white cotton trousers; stockings, and elastic-side boots past their best. At the sides of his microscopic ass, underneath him, were two small saddle-bags of old carpet, so far gone that I feared he might distribute part of his stock of the Scriptures on the road instead of among the popula tion. A thick stick in his hand, and a red sash, with a revolver in it, round his waist, finished his outward presentment. The missionary at Gaza, my worthy friend, Mr. Saphir, accompanied me as guide and companion. The hire of a horse and three asses, and of the men who came with us, was £3 13s. 4d.1 for eight days. tents, one belonging to Mr. Saphir, the from its owner at Gaza for sixpence a day! derful prices, of course, were those of private owners, not of "Tourists' Agencies." At Jerusalem, or Joppa, to hire from an "Agency " a traveller's tent, and a common one for the men, with the attendants and beasts, would have cost from four to five pounds a day.

We had two other rented

These won

Out, then, and away past the Tomb of Samson, a place of pilgrimage for the Moslem; then under the long .avenues of ancient olive-trees, the glory of Gaza, towards

1 Twenty-one Medjidieh.

Beit Hanun. On the roadside sat a counterpart of blind Bartimæus, turbaned, cross-legged, in a blue gaberdine with short sleeves, a stick by his side, his hand out for charity. Blindness is a terribly prevalent curse in the East-the desert alone excepted, for a blind Bedouin is rare. In Egypt, it has been said, one person in twenty is affected in his eyes, and the lowest estimate gives one blind in the hundred, while in England and Norway the proportion is only one in a thousand. It is impossible, indeed, to come upon any number of men, either in Palestine or on the Nile, without finding some of them sightless. The causes of this are not the heat, nor even the dust, so much as the rapid changes of temperature between day and night, which are greatest on the sea-coast, the special seat of this melancholy evil. The inflammation thus occasioned would not, however, lead to a great deal of blindness elsewhere; the neglect of any attempt to check the trouble is the real explanation; and this arises partly from laziness and stupidity, but much more from superstitious prejudices against medical treatment. It is most pitiful to see numbers of children with ulcers on the cornea eating away the sight, without any attempt being made to cure the evil. Wherever you halt, the blind come round you with the other children; and it is no wonder that when the fame of our Lord as the "opener of the eyes" spread abroad, numbers of all ages who were thus afflicted assembled to ask His gracious assistance.1 It would seem, indeed, from the more frequent mention of blindness in the New Testament than in the Old, as though blindness had increased in the course of ages, though the law of Moses curses him that maketh the blind to wander out of the way," or "puts a stumbling-block before him."2 But I had almost forgotten one great local cause of blindness, 1 Luke vii. 21; John v. 3. 2 Lev. xix. 14; Deut. xxvii. 18.

which everyone visiting the East must have noticed the spread of eye disease through the medium of flies. These pests carry infection, on their feet and proboscis, from one child to another, numbers of them lighting on the corner of the eye, and never apparently being driven off. Mothers, in fact, allow them to cling in halfdozens round the eyes of their babies, to ward off the "evil eye"; and it is sad to see the young creatures so habituated to what would torture Western children as never to resent it, even by a twitch of the cheek.

We passed Beit Hanun, with its dirty mud hovels and its rain-pond, round which a crowd of ragged children were playing, some naked boys swimming and paddling in it, and the village matrons filling their jars from it for household uses. A little farther on we met some people going to Gaza-one, a soldier, returning from the army, a dagger and pistols in his belt. As he went by the ruffian broke out in curses at us as Christians; but he reckoned without his host, for in a moment my fiery little missionary friend, who knows Arabic as he does English, rode up to him, his riding-stick uplifted, and asked him how he dared to insult strangers, ending by telling him that he was only fit to fight women, not men! I did not know all this till afterwards; but the fellow was cowed, and went off as meekly as a lamb.

The broad plain, or rather rolling land, through which we passed, was here and there green with lentils or barley, elsewhere ploughed for summer crops, but in large parts wild and untilled; offering pasture for flocks of sheep and goats, and herds of cattle. The little village of Nejid, at the foot of a little side-bay in the low hills of the Shephelah, on our right, was the first we passed after leaving Beit Hanun. Numbers of camels, cattle, and calves fed on the green recess before the