Waterbury evening Democrat., 1892-10-04

or farm, or a fence or hedge, or a house or hut outside of the squalid little | villages, or hardly a tree or green thing. I wonder if the Old Testament enumera- | tion of the population is strictly accu- | rate. According to Numbers, 1:46, not | less than 5000, 900 Jews came into Pal estine-five times as many as the pres ent entire population, and according to Second Samuel, 29:9, they had in- creased to 6,000, ,000-ten times the present population. This would give an average of 600 to the square mile surpassing that of the most fertile coun- tries of Europe. But we are told in the | Old Testament that the Hebrews from seventyfive all told increased to 3,oOo,- | 900 in about 800 years, which implies | that each woman had more than eighty | children. I am afraid there was some mistake in the Hebraic method of emu meration. How could such dense mul l titudes have been nourished on these | parched and dismal hills?
 I asked a well-informed Englishman in Jerusalem how the farmers got along.
 "Farmers?" he said, with surprised rising infection. ''There are none or next to none. All the people live in huts in the little villages. They go hungry the most of the time. They all try to get away and some succeed"
 It is not easy travelling here. There are only two roads in all these thou sands of miles; the rest of the thor oughfares arc mere camel tracks. We went on horseback down to the Dead sea and back, twenty-five miles, via Jericho. Didwe fall among thieves?"
 No, verify, for the reason that the thieves fell among us-at least the chief of them. The wild Bedouins , claim to own all of that country, be- ,, cause nobody but themselves live there, and they exact tribute. So when we de- cided to go it was necessary to do two things: First, we must send the . Yankee who dwells here in Jerusalem down to Jericho to open his hotel there the only building in the town except mud huts; and second, we must hire
 the sheil1 of the Bedouins to be our
 guide to keep his tribe from robbing
 and killing us. We paid him five dol
 lars day to ride at our head with a
 tremendously long rife and secure our
 safety. It was blackmail. But he was
 a picturesque creature, with loose
 baggy red trousers and an embroidered
 green cloak from Bagdad-he said he
 paid six dollars for it-surmounted by a
 scarlet tarboosh with big puggery
 around it that looked like the stars and
 stripes.
 One of the oldest things encountered
 in Palestine is a woman at churn.
 The churn of this region was once anl.
 mated, having been goat in it's better
 days. Now the goat has vanished from
 it, flesh and bone, for the table of the
 epicure, and the good wife hangs up tc
 a spike on the ceiling his skin by the
 neck and pours into the uncanny vesse. n her wooden trays of milk. Then she
 churns, by seizing the ghastly thing by IF the dropsical hind legs and swinging it half round her and back again in tire f. some oscillation, as monotonous as any :. old wooden churn in Yankee kitchen , When the butter ''sets' she rests he s. weary arms and rejoices, and then sh' l. carefully unties hind foot which ha
 served for handle, and draws out tn, h buttermilk, afterwards removing tn if butter by the way of slitted brisl1et
 This seems to be the universal churn o >4 the Orient
 , Whose milk is it? A goats probably ,t A sheep's, perhaps. A camel's occas a ionally. I am tired of goats cheese ~ sheep's milk and camers butter, an, 4 when I get home shall hug the frs ~ COW I see. w. A. CRoFFUT. v And Another, for Luck. T Il f