cupboards, many of them, so the coffee is freshly roasted and pounded in a mortar for breakfast.  The flour is taken to the hand-mill and butter comes out of the churn every day fresh.  Then the mother will have to draw the daily supply of water and wash the few clothes at the well.  The better classes have their slaves to do the hard work but the Bedouin women and the poor have to do all the toil and never get a rest.  Rich and poor are alike in not having any intellectual pleasures.  Few can read and even those who can read, are able to read only the Koran and the Moslem traditions.  The children have no primers or picture-books, and no Arab mother ever has a newspaper or a magazine.  She has never heard of such things.  Arab women do not know anything of the many interests and pleasures that occupy the time of women in Christian lands.

[Illustration:  WOMEN GRINDING AT THE MILL.]

Would you like to know how they make bread in Arabia?  First the wheat is sifted and cleaned and then it is put into one of the hand-mills.  It consists of an upper and nether millstone with a hole in the upper one and a wooden handle.  Two women usually sit and grind because the stone is heavy and they love to talk while they work.  One swings it half way and the other pulls it around.  Then the coarse flour is taken out and put into a bowl with water and salt and mixed to the right consistency.  A piece of this dough is then taken between the hands and gradually beaten until it is about the thickness of a book cover and twelve inches in diameter—­a round, flat cake of dough.  The oven is usually under ground and is shaped like a large jar with the mouth above the ground a little.  A fire is built inside the oven and when the sides of the oven are quite hot the fire is allowed to die out.  Then the large pan cakes of bread are deftly clapped on to the side of the oven until the space is covered and one by one the cakes are taken out when done.  In some houses they have a shallow oval pan which is placed over an open fire and on this the cakes are baked.  The pan is put on the fire upside down, so even here we are again in Topsy-turvy Land.  Twenty or thirty of these flat loaves are baked at one time, for a hungry Arab can eat five or six at one meal.

[Illustration:  BEDOUIN WOMEN EATING THEIR BREAKFAST.]

Now the men come in to eat the food that the housewife has prepared.  With a short prayer called bismillah they begin and then shove the rice and meat or the bread and gravy into their mouths as fast as they can.  Whatever is left when the men get through is for the women.  You can see a group of Arab women in the picture eating their meal from one common dish in front of their tent.  They use their hands instead of spoons or forks but get along very well and always wash before and after their simple meal.

Now the women always have to wait on their husbands and eat by themselves.  When things get right side up in this dark land we hope to see the whole family sitting down together and taking their meal with joy and thanksgiving.