Just before reaching Safed there is a rock called Akhbera, which rises five hundred feet sheer up from the path, and is also full of similar caves. Josephus mentions having fortified it. However prepossessing Safed may look from a distance, it does not bear a close acquaintance. Down the centre of every street runs an open sewer, which renders it the most odoriferous and pestiferous place that it has ever been my fate to sleep in. The aspect of the population is in keeping with the general smell. One seems transported into the ghetto of some Roumanian or Russian town, with a few Eastern disagreeables added. The population here have not adopted the Oriental costume as they have at Tiberias, but wear the high hats, greasy gabardines, and ear-curls of the Jews of Europe. Instead of Arabic, one hears nothing in the streets but “jargon,” as the dialect used by the Jews in eastern Europe is called. The total population of _Ashkenazim_, or German Jews, who are hived in this unenviable locality, is between five and six thousand; besides these there are about twelve hundred _Sephardim_, or Spanish Jews, who wear Oriental costumes, and in the other quarter of the town from six to seven thousand Moslems, making the total number of inhabitants about fourteen thousand. As there is nothing approaching to a hotel or boarding-house in the place, I was of course dependent on the native hospitality for board and lodging, and thus able to acquire an insight into the mode of life of rather a curious section of the human family. The majority of the Jews here are supported by a charitable fund called the Haluka, which is subscribed to by pious Jews all over the world as a sacred duty, for the purpose of providing support to those of their coreligionists who come here or to Jerusalem to pass the last years of their lives in devotional exercises, and to die on the sacred soil. The practical result of this system is to maintain in idleness and mendicancy a set of useless bigots, who combine superstitious observance with immoral practice, and who, as a rule, are opposed to every project which has for its object the real progress of the Jewish nation. Hence they regard with alarm the establishment of agricultural colonies, or the inauguration of an era of any kind of labour by Jews in Palestine. They are bitterly hostile to schools in which any secular teaching is carried on, and agree with those Western Jews who consider that any scheme for developing the material resources of Palestine by means of Jewish industry is fantastic and visionary. It is due to the Jewish population of Safed to say that this spirit does not prevail among the younger members of it. There are about a hundred young Safed Jews who actually work as day-labourers on the farms of Moslems and Christians, and I was informed by one of the most liberal of the rabbis, the only one, in fact, who was inclined to promote Jewish agriculture, that about two hundred families in Safed