If you would be cheated out of your eyeteeth, come to Jerusalem. Its bazaars are filled with tricksters and traders, and it has its usurers and money changers as in the days of the Saviour. The people prey upon the pilgrims and tourists. Their main object is to get gain, and they work the holiness of the Holy City for all it is worth. They sell candles which if burnt in the Church of the Sepulchre will carry away your sins in their smoke; and rosaries upon which if you count your prayers you may be sure of their ascending to heaven.

The rosary business is a big factor in Jerusalem. The beads are cut out in great quantities at Bethlehem and are shipped abroad by the millions. They are sent to the Holy City for sale, and there are some stores which have nothing else except perhaps crucifixes and collection plates.

The merchants who sell rosaries are often great rascals. I know one, a Bethlehemite, who has just received a lesson which he is not likely soon to forget. The man’s rosary store is situated down Christian Street, not far from the place where you turn in to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. His lesson came from a Jesuit priest, who lives in Chicago, and who is just now starting home. The holy father had come into the shop to buy some rosaries to carry back to his friends. He had picked out a half-dozen beautiful ones, and had paid the price without bargaining. As the storekeeper wrapped up his purchase, the priest looked at him out of the tail of his eye and saw him slip under the counter the rosaries selected and put some cheaper ones in their place. The Jesuit said nothing, but he took up several beautiful carvings representing the Crucifixion and Ascension, each of which was worth about twice as much as the rosaries he had chosen. Handing these to the man, he told him to wrap them up. This being done, he took both parcels and started out of the store. The Bethlehemite merchant ran after him, and told him he had not paid for the carvings. The father replied:

“My friend, I saw you change those rosaries and give me the cheaper ones, and you may consider this a judgment of God upon you for cheating. I shall keep these carvings, and if you do not immediately return to your store I will report you to the Mohammedan courts.”

The man, seeing he was caught, let the priest go.

Another large business is the selling of candles. Jerusalem is full of shrines, and the pilgrims buy candles to burn at the holy places. They set them up at the score or more sacred spots in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and at the stations along the Via Dolorosa where Christ walked on His way to Golgotha. They carry them to the Mount of Olives and to the Garden of Gethsemane. Some buy several candles for each shrine, and the richer purchase some of enormous size and many colours. The candle business is especially brisk at Easter time.

As I have said before, many of the streets are vaulted over, and we often pass for a half-mile through what might be called a subterranean cavern lighted by openings from the top and pierced at the sides with cavelike stores. The smallest business shops in the world are in Jerusalem. A great many of the stores are no bigger than a dry-goods box. They have no windows. I stopped this afternoon before a shoe repair shop, and, out of curiosity, took its measurements. It was a hole in the wall with its bottom edge four feet above the cobblestone street. A rude stone two feet high was the step by which the shoemaker crawled in. It was just three feet wide, five feet high, and eight feet deep. It was as dark as a pocket, and the shoemaker squatting in the entrance with a board on his lap filled it completely. He was working at a pair of rough Bedouin shoes the owner of which sat cross-legged and in his bare feet in the street outside. As the cobbler waxed his thread he was careful to move his hands toward the street and back into the shop. The place was so small that had he pulled his thread in the ordinary way he would have barked his elbows against the walls.

Next to this shoe shop there was a Jerusalem restaurant. It was an oval hole cut into the hill twelve feet high, eight feet wide, and forty feet deep. At the front was the cooking stove of Jerusalem, a rude slab of limestone with holes cut in the top as big around as a workman’s dinner bucket, and with other holes piercing these from the sides. A few inches from the top of each hole was a rude iron grating upon which the charcoal was laid. The draft which came in from below kept the fire going. The slab was mounted on cord-wood posts and had five fireplaces. At the back a rough table without a cloth was set for the guests. The only chairs were little stools a foot high and about a foot square the seats of which were of woven cords.

Each kind of business, or trade, has its own bazaar. There is a shoemaker’s bazaar where scores of cobblers are working. At the entrance to each cavelike shop two shoemakers sit sewing away with untanned calfskin aprons tight about them. Between them on a block of wood, an olive tree stump it may be, rests a slab of white marble. This is the shoemakers’ bench, upon which they pound the wet leather to make it soft with what looks like a brass paper weight. It is as big around as a tumbler and of about the same height, tapering from the top to the bottom.

The shoes are all made with needle and thread. The soles are of camel hide and the uppers of kidskin or goatskin. These are the common shoes of the peasant. As I watched the cobblers I asked about their wages and was told they received from forty to sixty cents for labouring from sunrise to sunset.

In another street tinsmiths are at work making pots and pans out of oil cans. Their shops are not much bigger than cupboards, and the workmen are long-bearded men in fez caps and gowns.

Farther on is the grain market, consisting of many great vaulted chambers one or more of which belongs to each merchant. The vaults are filled with piles of wheat, corn, barley, oats, and millet spread out on the floor. The grain is sold by measure. I saw a Bedouin come in to buy two bushels of oats. It was dipped out by the peck, the merchant shaking the measure to make the grain solid, and then heaping up the top with his hands so that the oats formed a cone. This was the “good measure pressed down, shaken together, and running over,” as mentioned in St. Luke. The people here never buy grain by the sack, for they want to see it measured out before their eyes. But I am told that the grain sellers are sometimes able to impose upon those who purchase, making them think they get more than they really do.

Much of the grain of the Holy City is ground at home and a great deal of that of Palestine is made into flour with hand mills. Some flour is imported and some is ground in mills worked by camels or donkeys. In baking bread the dough is kneaded at home and brought in great lumps to the public ovens to be found in almost every street. They are cave-like vaults running down below the street level. At the back of each vault is the oven with a sort of well before its open door. In the well stands the baker with a long paddle in his hand upon which he puts in and takes out the loaves. I have seen many bakeries of this kind. The fuel is olive wood, and the oven floor is marked out in blocks, so that the baking of each family may be put on a separate block. The loaves are about an inch thick and the size of a tea plate. Each has a hole in the centre. The baker gets a few cents for each half-dozen loaves, or he may instead take a toll of one loaf for each dozen. Before starting the baking he greases the floor of the oven with olive oil.

The reason for these public bakeries is the great cost of fuel. The Arabs have a proverb showing that such baking is the cheapest. This runs: “Send your bread to the oven of the baker even though he should eat the half of it.”

I frequently see boys carrying dough to these bakeries, or bringing bread home from them. They use trays which they bear on their heads. Ancient Jerusalem had its Bakers’ Street, for we read that King Zedekiah put the prophet Jeremiah into the court of the prison and commanded that they “should give him daily a piece of bread out of the Bakers’ Street.”

During my stay in Jerusalem I have enjoyed the salad which is served at the hotel with an olive oil dressing. This is a land of olives and the oil is delicious. It is as clear as honey with a tint like the green of chartreuse. I say I have enjoyed it, but I doubt whether I shall enjoy it hereafter. Why? I have seen how it is made.

Come with me to an oil mill which is kept in a cave just off David Street, not more than a stone’s throw from the Pool of Hezekiah. At the side of the door there is a stone ledge. In the centre of this is a hole as big around as a flour barrel in which, with his clothes tied up about his waist, with bare legs and bare feet, stands a sweating Ethiopian treading the oil out of the ground olives. Peeping over into the well in which he is standing, we see that he has a linen cloth laid on the top of the mushy mixture. He tramps this cloth into the olives with his feet and taking it up wet, wrings out the oil into a red clay basin from whence it is poured into pots to be strained for the market.

Farther back stand a camel and a very small, knotty little donkey munching away while the mill is not going. These animals grind up the olives, and in another cave opening into this we can see the mill itself. It is much like a horsepower grist mill, or the bark mill of a country tannery, and the camel and donkey walk round and round in a circle hitched to a bar which turns the mill. Their food is a brown cake made from what is left of the olives after the oil has been pressed out of them.

But let us go to market at the Jaffa Gate and see what the people have brought in from the country for sale. There are scores of women with baskets of vegetables before them. They have lettuce and eggplants and beautiful cauliflowers with heads as white as snow. They have lemons and oranges from Jaffa and apples and pears from the highlands of Judea. Many of the sellers are Bethlehem girls. Here are people selling beads, although most of the bead sellers are about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Many of the beads are of glass and come from Hebron, not far from the cave which is Abraham’s tomb. Hebron is the chief town of south Palestine and is a manufacturing centre. It makes lamps and bottles as well as glass trinkets and glass beads, which are sold all over the Holy Land.

The cock which reminded St. Peter of his denial of his Master has many descendants. You may see some of them in this market, tied by the legs and lying on the stones. The Holy City has no ordinance against crowing cocks, and nearly every family here keeps its own rooster. There are so many that the city resounds with their music, and about daybreak they start up a concert which murders sleep. I am living in the heart of Jerusalem—I might as well be in a barnyard. The rooster symphony begins with sunrise and keeps on until evening, and then the donkeys and camels take up the strain. The donkeys bray louder than did Balaam’s ass, and the camels whine and grumble all night. In addition to these noises, there are others which trouble the tourists. The people rise with the chickens and the stone streets reëcho their steps. The birds sing and the pedlars shout. At the same time the bells begin ringing to show that it is day, and the trumpets of the soldiers in David’s Tower add to the din. One can easily sleep in a railroad depot or near a boiler factory, for the noises there are of one or two kinds and the ear comes to know them. Here there is a new sound every minute.