=The market.=—­They took their wool, of course, to the open square where all the merchants sold their goods.  Soon buyers appeared who wanted wool.  It was a long process then, as now, to strike a bargain in an Oriental town.  It is very impolite to seem to be in a hurry.  You must each ask after one another’s health, and the health of your respective fathers, and all your ancestors.  By and by, you cautiously come around to the subject of wool.  How much do you want for your wool?  At first you don’t name a price.  You aren’t even sure that you want to sell it.  Finally you mention a sum about five times as large as you expect to get.  The buyer in turn offers to pay about a fifth of what it is worth.  After a time you come down a bit on your price.  The buyer comes up a bit on his.  After an hour or two, or perhaps a half a day, you compromise and the wool is sold.

=Weighing out the silver or gold.=—­In those early days there was no coined money.  Silver and gold were used as money, only they had to be weighed every time a trade was put through; just as though we were to sell so many pounds of flour for so many ounces of silver.  The weights used were very crude; usually they were merely rough stones from the field with the weight mark scratched on them.  The scale generally used was as follows: 

     60 shekels = 1 mana.
     60 manas = 1 talent.

The shekel was equal to about an ounce, in our modern avoirdupois system.  There was no accurate standard weight anywhere.  Honest dealers tried to have weights which corresponded to custom.  But it was easy to cheat by having two sets of weights, one for buying and one for selling.  So when our shepherds came to town, they had to watch the merchant who bought from them lest he put too heavy a talent weight in the balance with their wool, and too light a shekel-weight in the smaller balance with the silver.

THE HARD SIDE OF SHEPHERD LIFE

The most precious and uncertain thing in the shepherd’s life was water.  If in the rainy season the rains were heavy, and the wells and brooks did not dry up too soon in the summer, they had plenty of goat’s milk for food, and could bring plenty of wool to market in the fall.  But if the rains were scant their flocks perished, and actual famine and death stared them in the face.  In the dry years many were the tribes that were almost totally wiped out by famine and the diseases that sweep away hungry men.  The next year, on the site of their last camp, strangers would find the bones of men and women and little children, whitening by the side of the trail.  No wonder they looked upon wells and springs as sacred.  Surely, they thought, a god must be the giver of those life-giving waters that bubble up so mysteriously from the crevices in the rock.