entire family, moves out of the village into the vineyard.

The grape season is looked forward to as the best part of the year, and at this time the natives live for the most part on fruits and bread. Jokingly, the fellaheen say that they get so fat from eating grapes that their fezzes burst.

BEATING THE OLIVE TREES

A saying among the peasants likens the vine to a city woman, for it cannot stand being neglected for a single year; the fig tree to a Bedouin woman, for it can withstand about five years of neglect, and the olive tree to a fellaha woman, for it is still found alive after 60 years of neglect.

This simile is given to illustrate how hardy the olive tree is as compared with the fig and the vine. To an Occidental, familiar with the almost indestructible qualities of the olive, it also serves as an example of the hardiness of the women of this sturdy mountain race.

The olives are harvested in the fall, but by a method so injurious to the trees that they yield a full crop but once in two years. Instead of picking them by hand, for time is not money with these easygoing people, they beat the trees with sticks to knock off the fruit, which at the same time results in destroying the tender shoots which should bear the next year's fruit.

When questioned, they admit the folly. of this beating, but add that their fathers did so and why should they change. Evidently they are copying not only their fathers, but the Israelites before them, for we read in the Mosaic writings, "When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow."*

The olives when salted or pickled in brine are valued food, for a peasant can make a meal of only bread and olives, with perhaps the addition of a raw onion. The oil is a food staple, taking the place of meat. It is also, to a limited extent, burned in small clay lamps, identical in shape with those found in Canaanitish tombs, many of which were buried here before the Israelites possessed this land.

Deut. 24: 20.

CARE OF THE POOR

291

A characteristic of these poor peasants is their hospitality and their kindness to the destitute.

One can any day see a party of women coming to town with their baskets for the market, and as they pass the beggars sitting by the roadside, they drop them a bit of bread or a little of the produce brought in for sale, and frequently the donor will be seemingly as poor as the receiver.

One of the prettiest, perhaps, of all Arabic words is the one for bread, namely, aish, meaning life, for with them it is veritably the "staff of life." Bread is looked upon as almost sacred, and they will never allow a crumb to fall where it will be trodden upon, and if a fragment is found dropped, perhaps by some child, on the ground it is lifted and kissed and laid up on a wall or put into a crack where some animal or fowl may find it.

The village home has near it a small hut containing the oven, called the taboon. It is a dome some 3 to 4 feet in diameter, made by the women, of clay, with an opening in the top and is provided with a cover of the same material. It stands on the ground, slightly raised by stones beneath its rim. In the bottom is a thick layer of loose pebbles. It is heated by banking up around the outside a quantity of hot ashes.

After the day's baking the woman adds. as fuel some dried manure or stubble (see page 277), which ignites from the hot ashes and keeps smouldering, and so heats the oven for the next day's baking. Bread is made from soft and elastic dough. The woman brings a bowl of it to the taboon, makes a rather thin loaf by throwing a piece of the dough from hand to hand, and then flops it on to the pebbles at the bottom of the oven.

About six of these loaves fill the oven, and when baked they are full of the indentations made by the small stones. When well made and eaten warm, this bread is very good.

"THE MOTHER OF ALL TURTLES"

A story is told of a woman who refused to allow her neighbor to bake some dough in her taboon. The neighbor then