extreme; the winds blowing from the Great Sea brought the needed moisture for the vegetation; and so soft and equable was the air that, for ten months in the year, grapes and figs could be gathered.

The population, supported by the abundant fruits of the earth, was very large. Villages--which would elsewhere be called towns, for those containing but a few thousand inhabitants were regarded as small, indeed--were scattered thickly over the plain; and few areas of equal dimensions could show a population approaching that which inhabited the plains and slopes between the Sea of Galilee and the Mediterranean. None could then have dreamed of the dangers that were to come, or believed that this rich cultivation and teeming population would disappear; and that, in time, a few flocks of wandering sheep would scarce be able to find herbage growing, on the wastes of land which would take the place of this fertile soil.

Certainly no such thought as this occurred to Martha, as she re-entered the house; though she did fear that trouble, and ruin, might be approaching.

John was soon at work among the fig trees, aiding Isaac and his son Reuben--a lad of some fifteen years--to pick the soft, luscious fruit, and carry it to the little courtyard, shaded from the rays of the sun by an overhead trellis work, covered with vines and almost bending beneath the purple bunches of grapes. Miriam--the old nurse--and four or five maid servants, under the eye of Martha, tied them in rows on strings, and fastened them to pegs driven into that side of the house upon which the sun beat down most hotly. It was only the best fruit that was so served; for that which had been damaged in the picking, and all of smaller size, were laid on trays in the sun. The girls chatted merrily as they worked; for Martha, although a good housewife, was a gentle mistress and, so long as fingers were busy, heeded not if the tongue ran on.

"Let the damsels be happy, while they may," she would say, if Miriam scolded a little when the laughter rose louder than usual. "Let them be happy, while they can; who knows what lies in the future?"

But at present, the future cast no shade upon the group; nor upon a girl of about fourteen years old, who danced in and out of the courtyard in the highest spirits, now stopping a few minutes to string the figs, then scampering away with an empty basket which, when she reached the gatherers, she placed on her head and supported demurely, for a little while, at the foot of the ladder upon which John was perched--so that he could lay the figs in it 

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