it clean, but found to her sorrow that she had destroyed the peas in the priest’s pocket.  Poor priest, said she, he has lost all his peas which he had for lunch on the road!  But I will make it up to him.  So she went to her earthen jar and took a big double handful of hummus and put them into the priest’s pocket, and said no more.  He went on his way and threw out a pea every morning for weeks and weeks.  At length, some of his fellaheen heard that the feast had begun in another village, and told the Priest.  Impossible, said he.  My pocket is half full yet.  Others came and said, will you keep us fasting all the year?  He only replied, look into my pocket.  Are you wiser than the Bishop?  At length some one went and told the Bishop that the priest was keeping his people fasting for twenty days after the time.  And then the story leaked out, and the poor woman told how she had filled up the pocket, and the bishop saw that there was no use in trying to teach the man to count.

See the reapers in the field, and the women gleaning after them, just as Ruth did so many thousand years ago!  On this side is a “lodge in a garden of cucumbers.”

Now we come down upon the sea-shore again, and on our right is the great plain of Akkar, level as a floor, and covered with fields of Indian corn and cotton.  Flocks and herds and Arab camps of black tents are scattered over it.  Here is a shepherd-boy playing on his “zimmara” or pipe, made of two reeds tied together and perforated.  He plays on it hour after hour and day after day, as he leads his sheep and goats or cattle along the plain or over the mountains.  You do not like it much, any more than he would like a melodeon or a piano.  When King David was a shepherd-boy he played on such a pipe as this as he wandered over the mountains of Judea.

Now we turn away from the sea and go eastward to Halba.  Before long we cross the river Arka on a narrow stone bridge, and pass a high hill called “Tel Arka.”  Here the Arkites lived, who are mentioned in Genesis x:17.  That was four thousand two hundred years ago.  What a chain of villages skirt this plain!  The people build their villages on the hills for protection and health, but go down to plough and sow and feed their flocks to the rich level plain.  Now we cross a little stream of water, and look up the ravine, and there is Ishoc’s house perched on the side of the hill opposite Halba.  Ishoc and his wife Im Hanna, come out to meet us, and he helps us pitch the tent by the great fig tree near his house.  We unroll the tent, splice the tent pole, open the bag of tent pins, get the mallet, and although the wind is blowing hard, we will drive the pegs so deep that there will be no danger of its blowing over.