=The inside of the tents.=—­Our friend is eager to show us hospitality and invites us to enter his tent.  It is a low, squatting affair, and we have to stoop low to enter the opening in the front.  We note that the tent-cloth is a woolen fabric not like our canvas of to-day.  It is stretched across a center-pole, with supports on the front and back, while the edges are pinned to the ground much as our tents are.  There are curtains within the tent partitioning off one part for the men, and another for the women and children.  There are mats on the ground to sit on and to sleep on at night.

PREPARING FOOD

Like the housewives of all ages, the Hebrew women have food to prepare, and meals to get.  Their one great food is milk, not cows’ milk, but the milk of goats.  A modern traveler tells of meeting an Arab who in a time of scarcity had lived on milk alone for more than a year.

=A meager diet.=—­Besides fresh milk there were then as now a number of things which were made from milk.  The Hebrews on the desert took some milk and cream and poured it into a bag made of skin, and hung it by a stout cord from a pole.  One of the women, or a boy, pounded this bag until the butter came out.  This was their way of churning.  Cheese also was a favorite article of diet.  The milk was curdled by means of the sour or bitter juices of certain plants, and the curds were then salted and dried in the sun.  Curdled milk even more than sweet milk was also used as a drink.  It probably tasted like the kumyss, or zoolak, which we can buy in our drug stores or soda fountains.

We would get very tired of milk and milk products if we had nothing else to eat all the year round; and so did these shepherds.  They were eager to get hold of wheat and barley, whenever they could buy them.  The women took the wheat and pounded it with a wooden mallet or a stone in a hollow in some larger stone.  The coarse meal which they made in this way they mixed with salt and water and baked on hot stones before the campfire.  Once in a great while it was possible, in this shepherd life, to have a feast with mutton or kid or lamb.  But milk and wool were so valuable that the shepherds were very cautious about killing their flocks.  It was, you see, a very simple and healthful diet on which these tent-people lived.  But one meal was pretty much like another.  Dinner was like breakfast, and tomorrow’s meals would be just like to-day’s.  It is not strange that they often longed for a change, and looked with envy at the crops of the farmers in the settled lands beyond the desert.