keep the Sabbath, so it may interest you to hear a
letter from my cousin, giving an account how Sabbath was kept in
Jerusalem."

"My dear Millie,--I will explain as well as I can what it means to
prepare for Sabbath here, and how it is spent. About four o'clock on
Friday mornings Mother and I get up and prepare the Sabbath loaves. I
can tell you it is no easy matter, for, even when the weather is not
frosty, the exertion of kneading the dough makes you perspire. If you
finish kneading early enough, you get back to bed while the dough is
rising.

"Early on Friday mornings beggars start going from house to house
(especially the Sephardim and Yemenites or Arabian Jews). At each house
they are given small, fresh-baked chola, bun, or beigel. No one refuses
to give this. Later on, two respectable men or women go from house to
house collecting in a large bag whatever anyone gives them, such as
cholas, meat, cereals, oil, wine, or money. The Community know that
these things are not for themselves, but are to be distributed amongst
the sick and the most needy, who cannot beg for themselves. Sometimes we
have as many as six or seven people who come collecting, and no one ever
thinks of refusing them. In fact, everyone prepares for this, and gives
most willingly, knowing that the Sabbath must be celebrated by rich and
poor alike with the best one has.

"In a future letter I will tell you more about certain people who give
up a part of their time to works of charity, and how they do it; for
there is no Board of Guardians here, as there is in London.

"Then when Father and the boys go to synagogue, we start to prepare for
the day's work. First we take all the furniture we can out of the house,
so as to leave the rooms free for the lower part of the walls to be
whitewashed and the marble floors cleaned. Of course, we try to use as
little water as possible, as it is scarce, but even so the floors must
be clean and look well polished, and the wooden furniture washed and
rubbed well with sand.

"Then the tea-urn and all the saucepans and trays, which are either
brass or copper, have to be cleaned and brightened; and, as we cannot
get brass-polish here, we rub them with fine sand. It needs plenty of
'elbow grease' to make them look bright, but the rubbing well repays us.
Since we came here I quite understand how brass or copper
looking-glasses were used by our ancestors, for, after rubbing very hard
with fine sand and a piece of le