Here is a green field of wheat. The stalks stand as thick as grass, and rise and fall with the winds from the sea. There a native is ploughing with a bullock and donkey harnessed together. The plough is the rude implement of the Scriptures, and the dark-skinned farmer steadies it with one hand, while he carries a goad in the other. Farther on are camels dragging the ploughs. In places we see flocks of fat sheep, herded by boys, and now and then pass a village of flat, white-walled houses with thick roofs of thatch on which the grass grows. Nearly every house has a roof of sod about a foot deep, and as we near the hills, the towns on their sides rise up in green terraces. Here some shepherds in sheep-skin coats, with the wool inside, are watching their flocks, and there, pulling up bunches of grass for her cattle, is a maiden who makes us think of Ruth gathering wheat in the harvest-fields of Boaz. Here and there throughout the plains of Sharon we see the watch-towers built for soldiers posted to ensure the Turkish Sultan’s share of the farmers’ crops. The landscape here is far different from that of the United States. There are no houses or barns standing alone in the fields. There are no outbuildings of any description, and no haystacks or strawstacks. The people live in villages and go out to work in the fields. The only fences are cactus hedges, but most of the holdings are not fenced in at all. [Illustration: THE HOLY LAND] The land is fertile clear to the mountains, a distance of perhaps twenty miles. In the foothills there are patches of green, while higher up fields are here and there cut out of the rocks, which are built up to hold in the earth. I have never seen a country more rocky. The rough lands of the Blue Ridge are Nile farms compared to the hills through which our train climbs up to Jerusalem. In many places there is nothing but rocks. The limestone strata are piled stone upon stone, looking like mighty monuments rising on the hills. In some places mountains rise in steps forming pyramids of white limestone, sparsely sprinkled with patches of grass and red poppies. As we begin to ascend the hills of Judea, we come into the real land of the Israelites. Our railroad winds in and out among little mountains and we can see that in the past the whole country was terraced and that not a bit of land went to waste. What is now the grazing ground for sheep and cattle was once a garden. Palestine reminds us of other parts of the world. The rich fruit of the orange groves of Jaffa makes us think of Florida. Were it not for the lack of fences and barns, the plains of Sharon might be a slice out of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, or the rich fields of the Scioto Valley in Ohio. These hills are very like Italy near Genoa, or south France about Nice and Monte Carlo. The terraces are planted with olive trees and we see gray-green olive orchards everywhere.