, without house or
shed, often without a gate or entrance. Their sites were chosen
with reference to shade, defence, or water. Such were the inns
that sheltered Jacob when he went to seek a wife in Padan-Aram.
Their like may been seen at this day in the stopping-places of
the desert. On the other hand, some of them, especially those
on the roads between great cities, like Jerusalem and Alexandria,
were princely establishments, monuments to the piety of the kings
who built them. In ordinary, however, they were no more than the
house or possession of a sheik, in which, as in headquarters,
he swayed his tribe. Lodging the traveller was the least of
their uses; they were markets, factories, forts; places of
assemblage and residence for merchants and artisans quite as
much as places of shelter for belated and wandering wayfarers.
Within their walls, all the year round, occurred the multiplied
daily transactions of a town.

The singular management of these hostelries was the feature likely
to strike a Western mind with most force. There was no host or
hostess; no clerk, cook, or kitchen; a steward at the gate was all
the assertion of government or proprietorship anywhere visible.
Strangers arriving stayed at will without rendering account.
A consequence of the system was that whoever came had to bring
his food and culinary outfit with him, or buy them of dealers in
the khan. The same rule held good as to his bed and bedding, and
forage for his beasts. Water, rest, shelter, and protection were
all he looked for from the proprietor, and they were gratuities.
The peace of synagogues was sometimes broken by brawling disputants,
but that of the khans never. The houses and all their appurtenances
were sacred: a well was not more so.

The khan at Bethlehem, before which Joseph and his wife stopped,
was a good specimen of its class, being neither very primitive
nor very princely. The building was purely Oriental; that is
to say, a quadrangular block of rough stones, one story high,
flat-roofed, externally unbroken by a window, and with but one
principal entrance--a doorway, which was also a gateway, on the
eastern side, or front. The road ran by the door so near that
the chalk dust half covered the lintel. A fence of flat rocks,
beginning at the northeastern corner of the pile, extended many
yards down the slope to a point from whence it swept westwardly to
a limestone bluff; making what was in the highest degree essential
to a