Tiberias has been a Jewish centre since the time of Vespasian. Before that time, Jews avoided the city, because in building it Herod had disturbed a burial-place. To-day, by a strange coincidence, it is a tomb that gives it its special popularity for the Jews--the grave of the famous Rabbi Meir. Conveniently near the tomb there are large baths, whose warm and sulphurous water is considered highly medicinal. At this tomb a curious spectacle may be seen on the second day of May each year. Jewish pilgrims from near and far assemble, bringing with them their oldest garments, which are immersed in a great cauldron of oil, and then piled up and burned. The honour of setting fire to the pile is sold to the highest bidder, and the sum paid reaches £15 or more. The same fascination of death, seen as it were past a byplay of irreverence and grotesqueness, is felt in the burial customs as they are seen to-day. At the Moslem funerals we saw there was no appearance of mourning. The men were dressed in gay colours, and they trotted along behind the corpse talking and gesticulating with an apparent gusto. It may have been the unusual appearance of the thing which impressed strangers more powerfully than natives; but to us it seemed that the realism of death was here in more crude and aggressive consciousness than in Western funerals. The corpse lay on a board, shoulder-high, with a gorgeous crimson and purple pall covering his body and limbs instead of a coffin. The head, wrapped tight in a napkin, rested on a pillow, and the features of the face stood prominently out against the sky. The man seemed, in an altogether gruesome way, to be _attending_ his own funeral, and to be thrusting the fact of his presence on the spectators.