[Illustration:  DATES GROWING ON A DATE PALM.]

The date tree is very beautiful.  I think it is the most beautiful of all the palms.  It is no wonder that a palm branch is the symbol of victory in the Bible and that the psalmist compares the life of a righteous man to a palm-tree!  How straight and beautifully proportioned is the tall trunk of the tree.  It is an evergreen and is always flourishing winter and summer.  It is a lovely sight to see the huge clusters of ripening fruit, golden-yellow or reddish-brown, amid the bright green branches.  Along the rivers in the north of Arabia, at Hassa and in Oman, date orchards stretch for miles and miles as far as you can see.  Some of the Arabs have such large date gardens that they do not know the number of their trees.  How do you suppose they climb the tree?  The Arabs have no ladders and indeed it would be hard to make a ladder long enough to reach to the top of a tall palm tree.  So they use a rope band which goes around the trunk of the tree and around their waist; it is shoved up little by little and the Arab puts his bare feet on the rough bark of the tree and so climbs up as easily as a monkey.  The palm tree is perhaps the most useful tree in the world.  Every part of it is used for something or other, and I do not see how Arabia could get along without palm trees.  The fruit is prepared in many different ways for food.  The date stones are used by the Arab children in playing checkers and other games on the smooth sand.  They are also ground up into a coarse kind of meal and this is good cattle-food.  The branches of the date tree are long and strong and thin just like a piece of rattan.  From them the carpenters make beds, tables, chairs, cradles, bird-cages, reading-stands, boats, crates, kites and a dozen other useful things.  The leaves are woven into baskets, mats, fans and string.  From the bark excellent fibre makes rope of all sizes.  Not a bit of the tree is wasted.  Even the blossoms are used to make a kind of drink and the old musty fruit that cannot be eaten is made into date syrup or date vinegar.

In one of the pictures you see the fire wood market at Busrah.  The long branches you see are sold for kindling wood and they make a splendid fire.  The heavier parts of the tree are also used for fuel and the donkeys are loaded with these date knots and date sticks in baskets.  It is a busy scene and, what with braying of donkeys and shouting of the wood-merchants, there is enough noise too.

[Illustration:  FIRE WOOD MARKET, BUSRAH.]

There is one more blessing that comes from the palm tree and which we have forgotten.  That is shade.  Arabia is a hot and dry country.  The summer sun is much more piercing than in America and the summer is much longer.  When you travel a long camel journey across the desert, oh how good it is to come to a grove of palm trees and rest!  Such a place is called an oasis and underneath the palms there are always springs of water.  I can well