the remainder was stored for making Arab loaves for the servants.
The large terra-cotta jars, glazed inside, and rough without, ranged round the room, often made me think of Ali Baba and the forty thieves. One held the smeed, another held flour, another bran, a fourth oil, and some rather smaller ones contained olives and goats’-milk cheese preserved in oil, and a store of cooking butter. Oranges and lemons garnished the shelves. Dried figs strung on thin cord, and pomegranates tied one by one to ropes, hung in festoons from the rafters, and the bundles of dried herbs of Carmel smelled sweetly.
My kind neighbor taught me how to add to my stores at the right seasons, to make fruit preserves, to concentrate the essence of tomatoes, and to convert wheat into starch by steeping it in water, straining it, and drying it in the sun—for making sweet dishes, as well as for the laundry. The Arabs do not starch or iron their clothes, so I had a little difficulty at first in procuring help in the "getting up" of fine linen. However, an Arab youth, who had once lived with a semi-European tailor, and professed to know how to handle an iron, though he acknowledged that starching was a mystery to him, volunteered assistance, and did his best. Subsequently a young Arab girl in our service was taught the art by an Abyssinian slave, the servant of a European neighbor, and she became very skillful.
Arabs only use starch for making a sort of blancmange, and they shrink from the idea of stiffening linen with it, for they have a strong respect for wheat in any shape. If a morsel of bread fall to the ground, an Arab will gather it up with his right hand, kiss it, touch his forehead with it, and place it in a recess or on a wall, where the fowls of the air may find it, for they say, "We must not tread under foot the gift of God." I have seen this reverence exhibited constantly, by all classes of the people, by masters, servants, and even by little children, Moslems, and Christians.
