The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. XX, No. 987, November 26, 1898

JERUSALEM.
TOWN LADY AND COUNTRY WOMEN.
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Elizabeth and I mounted a camel and took our last schimmel hauer , or airing, in Jaffa the beautiful. As our ungainly steed swung up the road with us on his back, and a peculiarly contemptuous expression on his face, we became objects of much curiosity to the natives, who stopped to gaze and point at us. We were amused to see the women in their excitement stand with unveiled faces unmindful of the men, who equally excited had joined them. Their remarks on our appearance were not exactly complimentary. Look at the Frangi ladies, how they sit! How funny they look! The Frangis are all mad! See, they smile! We did not understand Arabic, and our missionary friend was too kind to translate freely, otherwise we might not have smiled.
What a glorious morning it was! The remembrance of it now brings a delicious dreaminess over my senses. It must have been on such a day that Lothair and the radiant Mr. Phœbus journeyed from Jaffa to Jerusalem, when the lovely Euphrosyne rode through lanes of date-bearing palm-trees, and sniffed with her almond-shaped nostrils the all-pervading fragrance. Sharon, the great maritime plain, once a huge forest, from which it takes its name, lay stretched before us. In the midst of its magnificent orange groves, its flower bedecked meadows, its peaceful cornfields, rose the stately palms, their plumed heads nodding in the faint breeze. Beyond, like an Arabian Nights Geni, the stagnant clouds rested on the peaks of the Judæan hills, while in sharp contrast the restless Mediterranean flashed a thousand brilliant lights. Even the dreaded black rocks at the entrance of the harbour were robbed of their terror by the soft sunshine. We were loath, indeed, to leave so lovely a scene, but we comforted ourselves with the thought of returning again some day.
An hour after midday we had said good-bye to our kind hostesses, and seated in a ramshackle old carriage which threatened to come to pieces at any moment, were driving—save the mark!—in all haste to the railway station. Our road lay through the market, whose odoriferous Asiatic smells are particularly unpleasing to English noses. We thought our driver divined this, for he wasted no time, but with terrific shouts and pistol-like cracks of an enormous whip, scattered to the right and left everything and everybody in the line of route, and brought us up to the station in dashing style but exhausted condition.