and then said, "Good-bye," or rather, "God be with you," to Miriam. The elder woman led me back across the court, pointing to a kitchen on one side, and to the well filled store-room on the other. She drew her long white vail across the lower part of her face, as we entered the workshop. She kissed my brother's hands, and then served us with coffee and preserves. Our servants now arrived with the horses, and we left the workshop of the Bethlehem carver. His parting words, "The peace of God be with you, O my protector;" and the answer which my brother gave, "God's blessing be upon you and upon your house," reminded me of the salutations exchanged by Boaz and the reapers, long ago, in one of the fields at the foot of the hill we were descending, where we could see oxen treading out the corn on the numerous thrashing-floors.
We approached the particular spot which local tradition connects with the names of Ruth and Boaz; but it was enough for me that they had met somewhere in that broad and fertile valley, and that the town of Bethlehem, though changed, was the very town in which Ruth rejoiced over her first-born son; where the sorrows of Naomi were turned into joy, and "the women, her neighbors, rejoiced with her." We stood in the midst of little groups of men, women, and children. Some were attending to the mules
and take up thy bed and go thy way into thine house;" and if the houses of Capernaum were built like most of the houses of the present day in the towns of Palestine, the uncovering of the roof referred to in the fourth verse of the same chapter, admits of an easy explanation. The inner court of the house is usually more spacious than any of the surrounding rooms, and often there are platforms or benches of stone on each side, spread with carpets and cushions, used as divans during the day and as sleeping places at night. To such a court Christ may have retreated when the crowd increased. We may imagine him there, with the wondering people round him, and the crafty and scornful scribes seated near on the divan—all sheltered from the hot sun by some kind of matting or canvas, supported on a trellis-work of tree-branches and planks, more or less secure. When the sick man was carried by his friends to the house where Christ was preaching, "they could not come nigh to him for the press," so they very naturally went on to the terrace or house-top, and "uncovered the roof" of the court, that is, they removed the matting which sheltered it, and then they "broke up" the trellis work and let down the bed whereon the sick of the palsy lay. If an ordinary house-top had been broken up, the wooden beams, and the masses of earth and stone of which it is composed, would in falling have endangered the lives of those below.
