thern hills beyond Hebron towards
Jerusalem, to furnish tabernacles for the Jewish festival; or an immense
party of Kerak people from beyond the Dead Sea, with their camels, asses,
mules, besides flocks, for sale, conveying butter and wheat to Jerusalem,
encamped below us and singing at their watch-fires by night.

Large fires were sometimes visible upon the Moab mountains at the
distance of thirty or forty miles in a straight line. These may have
arisen from carelessness, or accidental circumstances, among either
standing corn or the heaps of harvest in the open air; or they may even
have been wilful conflagrations made by hostile tribes in their raids
upon each other. In any case they showed that wherever such things
occurred in ancient times, Ruth the Moabitess, when settled in Bethlehem,
might still have been reminded in that way of her native country, which
lay before her view.

At the Bakoosh we heard the single gun-fire at sunrise or sunset while
the Pasha had his camp at Hebron; and from the highest part of our hill
could see the flash of the guns in the castle of Jerusalem when saluting
the birthday of Mohammed.

For domestic incidents we had the children pelting each other with acorns
by moonlight; bonfires made by them and the servants on the terrace to
show us the way when returning at a late hour from Jerusalem; large
bunches of grapes from the adjoining vineyard, the _Karaweesh_, suspended
against the wall, reserved to become raisins. Then family presents upon
a birthday, all derived from the ground itself,--one person bringing a
bunch of wild thyme in purple blossom,--another some sprigs from a
terebinth tree, with the reviving odour of its gum that was exuding from
the bark,--and another a newly-caught chameleon.

The latter was for several days afterwards indulged with a fresh bough of
a tree for his residence, changed about, one day of oak, next of
terebinth, then of sumach, or of pine, etc.

Such was our "sweet home" and family life on the Byeways of Palestine.

But a time came when care and anxiety told heavily upon mine and my
wife's health. For some days I was confined to bed in the tent, unable
to move up to the house; yet enjoying the reading of my chapters in
Hebrew in the land of Israel, or ruminating over the huge emphasis of St
Paul's Greek in 2 Cor. iv. 17, [Greek text]. The curtains of the tent
were thrown wide open at each side for the admission of air; the children
were playing