and hammering thin, flat, iron plates which are used in the East for the shoeing of mules and donkeys. These discs that are made with only one small hole in the centre, must in many ways be prejudicial to the comfort and health of the beast, or so we should think, since they cause its frog to grow foul and rot away. The teachings of practical experience, however—for which after some study of such things I have great respect seem to prove this kind of shoe to be best suited for use upon the stony tracks of the country. These plates are secured to the animal's hoof by six of the huge-headed nails that I have mentioned, and if properly fixed will last for several months without renewal.

The instrument used to trim the hoof before the shoe is fastened, is a marvellous tool, almost of the size of a sickle with a flat knife attached to it as large as a child's spade. Probably all these implements, especially if connected in any way with agriculture, such as the wooden hook with an iron point which they call a plough, are essentially the same as those that were familiar to the Phoenicians and the Mycenian Greeks. In the Holy Land, at any rate, as we shall see later, they have not changed since the time of our Lord.

That this was so as regards the shoeing of horses in or about the year 1430 is proved by the following passage which I take from the travels of Bertrandon de la Brocquière of Guienne, who made a pilgrimage to Palestine in 1432. He says:

"I bought a small horse that turned out very well. Before my departure I had him shod in Damascus; and thence as far as Bursa, which is fifty days' journey, so well do they shoe their horses that I had nothing to do with his feet, excepting one of the fore ones, which was pricked by a nail, and made him lame for three weeks. The shoes are light, thin, lengthened towards the heel, and thinner there than at the toe. They are not turned up, and have but four nail-holes, two on each side. The nails are square, with a thick and heavy head. When a shoe is

wanted, and it is necessary to work it to make it fit the hoof, it is done cold, without ever putting it in the fire, which can readily be done because it is so thin. To pare the hoof they use a pruning knife, similar to what vine-dressers trim their vines with, both on this as well as on the other side of the sea."

This description might well apply to the shoeing of animals in Cyprus and Syria to-day.

From the inn we walked to the municipal market, where we found many strange vegetables for sale, including radishes large as a full-grown carrot. Nothing smaller in the radish line seems to flourish here, and I am informed that for some occult reason it is impossible to intercept them in an intermediate stage of their development. Perhaps, like mushrooms, they spring up in a single night. I am grateful to these vegetables, however, for the sight of them made clear to me the meaning of a passage by which I have long been worried. I remember reading, I forget where, in the accounts of one of the pyramid-building Pharaohs-Chufu, I believe -that he supplied tens of thousands of bunches of radishes daily to the hundred thousand labourers who were engaged upon the works.

What puzzled me was to know how Chufu provided so enormous and perennial a supply of this vegetable. The radishes of Cyprus solve the problem. One of these would be quite enough for any two pyramid-builders. I tasted them and they struck me as stringy and flavourless. Another old friend in a new form was celery tied in bunches, but such celery! Not an inch of crisp white root about it, nothing but green and leathery head. It appears in this form because it has been grown upon the top of the ground like a cabbage. Many people have tried to persuade the intelligent Cypriote to earth up his celery, but hitherto without result. "My father grew the herb thus," he answers, "and I grow it as my father did." Doubtless the Phoenicians, ignorant of the

arsenic it is said to contain, liked their celery green, or perhaps it was the Persians.

Meat and game, the former marked-so advanced is Limasol with the municipal stamp for octroi purposes, are also sold here. There on one stall next to a great pile of oranges, lie half-a-dozen woodcock, brown and beautiful, and by them a brace of French partridges now just going out of season, while further on is a fine hare. On the next, hanging to hooks, are poor little lambs with their throats cut, scarcely bigger than the hare, any of them; and full-grown sheep, some not so large as my fat blackfaced lambs at Easter. A little further on we came to a cobbler's shop, where we inspected the native boots. These are made of goatskin and high to the knee, with soles composed of many thicknesses of leather that must measure an inch through. Cumbersome as they seem, the experience of centuries proves these boots to be the best wear possible for the inhabitants of the mountainous districts of this stony land. On the very day of which I write I saw a Cypriote arrayed in them running over the tumbled ruins of an ancient city and through the mud patches whereby it was intersected, with no more care or inconvenience than we should experience on a tennis lawn.