The beautiful lilies and poppies vanish as summer comes upon the rolling, treeless plain. The corn ripens and harvesting begins. Machinery plays as little part here to-day as it did among the “alien corn” near Bethlehem long ago, when pretty Ruth worked for Boaz. In Palestine the world has stood still for a thousand years or more, or when it moved it moved backward. Much of the barley and wheat is pulled up, roots and all, but some is cut with sickles. In each village there is a harvest floor—a patch of clean, hard ground, where each man builds his little stack and sees about the threshing. Occasionally you see the flail at work, but it is not popular. To wield the flail is hard work. So the Bedouin employs his cattle, his wives and his children. He spreads the loose crop in a little circle about two feet deep. Donkeys and oxen and ponies are then tied together, from two to four abreast, and goaded round and round upon the straw. Sometimes the threshing is done by their hoofs alone; but often a rude wooden sledge is drawn after them. Time is of no concern. The cattle barely move; the owner sits with his friends under the shade of an olive tree, smoking many cigarettes and occasionally dreaming luxuriously over his hubble-bubble; pleasant breezes blow across from the gleaming Mediterranean. The season has been generous: Allah is good. Why hurry? The threshing finished, rough wooden forks are used to remove the coarsest straw, and then the winnowing begins. Day after day the harvest is thrown high into the air, and, slowly but surely, the chaff and dross are separated from the grain by the Mediterranean breezes. Then the Turk comes—or he did before the war—and takes from thirty to sixty bushels out of every hundred! That is why the Bedouin is so fond of glinting in the sunshine, like the piece of glass bottle in the old fairy tale. H. S. G. [Illustration] [Illustration] “Standing to.” While the sleep-drunk world behind lies still abed, And the dawn breath chills the smoking mists before, Down the lines between in commune of the Dead, There are eyes, that world of slumber watching o’er; There are trenches darkly sheening readied steel, There are orbs aglint, the darkness peering through; And the shades of Night, the shades of Death scarce veil, For the millions, to the Day, who’re “Standing to” “Standing to”—in grim attesting to a Thought, By the scars that weal Earth’s Face from sea to sea In the pride to set the need of Life at naught For the will to live a fancied Destiny; Waiting, watching, till the hour of dree be gone, Or muezzin-guns roar forth their hate anew— O! Well may the world of Slumber slumber on, For those watchers of the Dawn, who’re “Standing to.” BRENTOMMAN.