One of the queer superstitions here in Jerusalem is the idea that a marriage in a cemetery will propitiate the Lord and cause Him to favour His people. This is believed by the native Jews, and several cemetery weddings have recently occurred on account of the drought. Palestine has had no rain for weeks and the crops are drying up. The people are wildly excited over the prospect. There is also an epidemic of infantile paralysis, which has been carrying off the children. The people think that God is angry with them, and perhaps wroth because the graveyard marriages have been too few. To pacify Him they have had weddings in the cemeteries, though a graveyard is considered a most unlucky place for starting upon the life matrimonial. Indeed, it so unlucky that brides and grooms have to be hired to get married there. At a marriage which took place this week the couple received two hundred dollars in gold, besides food for two years, as a present for having the ceremony in the cemetery. In this case the groom was a Jew from Yemen, Arabia, and the bride a Jewess from Aleppo, in Syria. The bride was late coming, and the three thousand worshippers who had assembled to see the ceremony had to wait for two hours. She was finally carried in under a canopy, and took her stand on one side of an open grave while the bridegroom stood on the other. Standing thus they exchanged marriage vows. Two more cemetery weddings are planned, but it is difficult to get willing couples, as such marriages are supposed to be disastrous. Nevertheless, the charm seems to be working. The wind has changed since the first ceremony took place, and it may rain by and by. CHAPTER XII EASTER IN JERUSALEM At no time in the whole year is the Holy City so interesting as during Easter Week. Jerusalem seems always filled to overflowing, but during Holy Week it is crowded and jammed with people for days and nights on end to a degree that it is impossible to describe. I had the good fortune to be here during the most remarkable Easter that Jerusalem ever had, when by a curious coincidence the calendars of the various sects fixed the holy feasts on the same days, and the Jewish Passover and the Mohammedan festival of Nebu Musa, or the pilgrimage from the Mosque of Omar to the tomb of Moses, came during Easter Week. These celebrations packed the narrow, vaulted, winding streets of Jerusalem with a jam of crushed and crushing humanity. They filled the monasteries which surround the walls with tens of thousands of pilgrims, and clothed the Holy City in a greater variety of colours than were in the coat which Jacob gave to his favourite son Joseph.