stretching across to other booths in the centre--if the market is a
wide one--are pieces of cloth, vines on trellis, or canes interwoven
with brushwood. As the sun gains strength these afford a most grateful
shade, and during the heat of the day there is no more pleasant place
for a stroll, and none more full of characteristic life. In the wider
parts, on the ground, lie heaps two or three feet high of mint,
verbena and lemon thyme, the much-esteemed flavourings for the
national drink--green-tea syrup--exhaling a most delicious fragrance.
It is early summer: the luscious oranges are not yet over, and in
tempting piles they lie upon the stalls made of old packing-cases,
many with still legible familiar English and French inscriptions.
Apricots are selling at a halfpenny or less the pound, and plums and
damsons, not to speak of greengages, keep good pace with them in price
and sales. The bright tints of the lettuces and other fresh green
vegetables serve to set off the rich colours of the God-made
delicacies, but the prevailing hue of the scene is a restful
earth-brown, an autumnal leaf-tint; the trodden ground, the sun-dried
brush-wood of the booths and awnings, and the wet-stained wood-work.
No glamour of paint or gleam of glass destroys the harmony of the
surroundings.

But with all the feeling of cool and repose, rest there is not, or
idleness, for there is not a brisker scene in an oriental town than
its market-place. Thronging those narrow pathways come the rich and
poor--the portly merchant in his morning cloak, a spotless white wool
jelláb, with a turban and girth which bespeak easy circumstances; the
labourer in just such a cloak with the hood up, but one which was
always brown, and is now much mended; the slave in shirt and drawers,
with a string round his shaven pate; the keen little Jew boy pushing
and bargaining as no other could; the bearded son of Israel, with