A Fellah village consists of from twenty to a hundred cabins, huddled together, generally on rising ground and near water. In the hills the village is built principally of stone, the materials being collected from ancient ruins, and hardly ever, I believe, fresh quarried; in the south the roofs have stone domes, in the north they are of brushwood, supported on logs or beams as rafters, and covered with mud, which requires to be rolled every year. The interiors generally contain no furniture beyond bedding, mats, and cooking utensils; the house has no chimney, and the smoke of the wood fire goes out at the wooden door, or by the unglazed windows. Among the better class of the peasantry a few carpets will be found in use; and a raised diwân, as described in the account of our feast at Jeb’a, occupies part of the room. The village generally has one high house, of two storeys, in its middle, where the Sheikh or hereditary chief lives; booths are erected in summer on the roofs of the houses, where the inmates sleep at night; on the outskirts of the village are orchards of fig or pomegranate, with hedges of prickly pear, and perhaps fine olive-groves; close by is the Mukâm, with its white dome, and round it the shallow graves with rough headstones, between which the purple iris (or lily of Palestine) grows very commonly, while in the better-built tombs a little hollow for rain water is scooped in the covering slab of stone, as an act of charity towards thirsty birds. In the plains the only difference in the villages is, that the cabins are built of sun-dried brick, and roofed with mud. The bricks are made in spring by bringing down water into ditches dug in the clay, where chopped straw is mixed in with the mud; thence the soft mixture is carried in bowls to a row of wooden moulds or frames, each about ten inches long by three inches across; these are laid out on flat ground and are squeezed full, the clay being then left to harden in the sun. The houses thus built require to be patched every year, and the old roofs are covered in spring with grass self-sown, which withers as soon as the sun becomes strong (Ps. cxxix. 6). The population of a village averages about four hundred, ranging from thirty or forty, up to a thousand in the well-built Galilean towns. The men are employed in agriculture, the boys tend the flocks, the women cook and fetch water. The first scene on approaching a village is that at the well or spring, to which lithe damsels and portly matrons, scantily clad, bring down the great black or brown jars, returning rapidly with the load of water poised on a pad on the head. The screaming, scolding, and chatter of these crowds of women passes all description; if of one of them the traveller asks for the Sheikh, he still receives the old answer, “Behold, he is before you” (1 Sam. ix. 12).