The Palestine of the Bible was a land of the farmer. The Children of Israel and their leaders were brought up or worked on the farm. Abraham had numerous sheep and so had Isaac and Jacob. Saul was the son of old Farmer Kish, and he was hunting his father’s asses when he was met by Samuel, the prophet, who gave him a kingdom. David was watching the sheep when Farmer Jesse, his father, sent him to the battle, where with his sling he killed the mighty Goliath. Lot was one of the richest farmers the Jordan Valley has known, and as for Job, who lived in old Uz, he was the cattle king of his time, owning seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she-asses. It was in one farm village, Bethlehem, that our Saviour was born, and in another farming settlement, Nazareth, that He grew up to manhood. A great part of His life was spent in going about among the shepherds and farmers, and in His preaching most of the examples and figures in His parables were drawn from things of the soil. The most common sight out of doors in the Holy Land is the sheep. They are everywhere. You find them on the rich plains where the Philistines lived; they feed among the rocks on the slopes of the Judean mountains, and spot the wilderness all the way down to Jericho; they graze on every part of Samaria and Galilee and almost everywhere on the plain of Esdraelon. They are always watched over by shepherds who often drive them to new feeding grounds. The greater part of this country is mountainous. Limestone rocks cover the soil, which is so thin that if you could pare it off for a depth of eight inches there would be nothing but stone. It is different in the plains and the valleys, but the hills are terraces of rock covered with boulders and sprinkled here and there with patches of earth. Yet the least bit of soil will grow luxuriant grass, and the sheep seem to grow fat on the stones. I remember some flocks I saw on my way to the Jordan. They were composed of heavy-wooled animals with tails of fat hanging down like aprons behind them. The best of them weighed two hundred pounds each, and the average was fatter and finer than the best sheep of America. Some were white-wooled and some brown, and some had brown heads and white bodies. I have tasted the mutton; it is excellent, being the choicest meat to be had at the hotels. [Illustration: The colonists terrace the hillsides to hold back the soil with stones cleared from the fields, once thought too rocky for cultivation. Many neglected and treeless hills have been utterly denuded of earth by the rains of centuries] [Illustration: Almonds have proved a paying proposition for Jewish colonists in Palestine, where they have long been cultivated. When Jacob desired his sons to take into Egypt of the best fruits of Canaan, he mentioned the almond]