Since Dr. Bowen's departure, the community has been very fluctuating, and sometimes quite dispersed. When I attended their service in the school-room, there were about twenty men and thirty boys present. A dozen women sat in an adjoining room, looking in and listening at an open arched window. They were all closely vailed. The service was well conducted by Michael Kawarre, a native teacher. The Gospel was read by a boy, only twelve years of age, in a clear though very monotonous voice. The responses were made most energetically.
M. Zeller, a German, had recently been appointed by Bishop Gobat to take charge of the community, and he was eagerly studying Arabic, that he might commence his missionary labors. He kindly left his lonely study, now and then, to explore Nablûs and its neighborhood with me.
One morning we walked through the stony, arched, narrow, tortuous streets, out at the nearest gate, and rose on to the raised road or terrace, which nearly encircles the town. He led me to the hill beyond the burial-ground, whence I could see the whole extent of Nablûs, with its mosques and minarets, its irregular groups of houses, with domes and terraced roofs, its dark archways and colonnades, and the gardens of lemons and oranges around. Then we climbed a steep and stony path, to see an ancient fountain and a reservoir formed of a sarcophagus, where closely vailed women were washing their tattered garments. A group of men were leisurely building up the broken stone wall of the water-course. They were working with clumsy looking tools, and each man had a gun slung over his shoulder.
We followed the course of the duct, which conveys water from the fountain along the terraces round the town. The stones of the aqueduct were moss-grown, and between them bright juicy leaves of the most vivid green had sprung up. At short intervals there were square apertures, through which we could see the running limpid water, in a frame-work of maiden-hair and other ferns, and white
